Top 2025 HR Trends: Unlocking Real AI Value for HR

2025 isn’t just another year in HR — it’s a turning point. For years, AI in HR was treated as a distant innovation, full of potential but without clear application. Today, that potential is a reality. AI is no longer a buzzword; it’s a transformative force driving measurable impact across hiring, workforce planning, and career development.

Reflecting on Talent Trends 2024, many of the predictions made last year are now shaping the HR landscape:

Skills-forward hiring is scaling across organizations
Automated recruiting processes are advancing toward hyper-personalized experiences
Data connectivity has emerged as a critical priority for actionable AI

This year’s HR trends build on these foundations, offering organizations a roadmap to scale automation, personalize hiring, embrace skills-first frameworks, and empower employees with intelligent tools.

During our webinar , Mai Elhosseiny, VP of Talent at Majid Al Futtaim Holding and Greg Vert, Human Capital Applied AI Leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP, shared invaluable insights. Their experiences underscore how leading organizations are leveraging AI to move from experimentation to enterprise-wide transformation.

Watch the entire discussion here, or catch the highlights below.

Trend 1: AI Automation is Moving from Pilots to Enterprise Scale

For years, AI in HR has remained in the pilot phase. As of today, only 25% of organizations have successfully scaled their AI initiatives. But 2025 is the year this changes. Organizations are moving beyond experimentation, delivering measurable, enterprise-wide transformation.

But moving AI automation from pilot to enterprise scale requires more than ambition — it demands readiness and strategic alignment.

Vert highlighted three key pillars for successful scaling:

Data Readiness

“Data is the lifeblood of AI,” Vert explained. Without clean, connected, and comprehensive datasets, scaling AI becomes impossible. Organizations like Majid Al Futtaim have made significant investments in data normalization to ensure their AI initiatives deliver actionable insights.

“Data is the foundation of everything we do. It’s not just about collecting information — it’s about making it actionable, insightful, and aligned with our goals,” emphasized Elhosseiny.

Governance Frameworks

It’s important for companies to realize that AI isn’t a one-time project — it’s an evolving system that requires trust, compliance, and ethical alignment. Majid Al Futtaim integrates governance into their AI framework, ensuring their systems remain agile and aligned with organizational values.

AI Ethics and Responsibility Councils, which operate from the executive level down through every layer of the organization, can help. In addition, partnering with organizations that share an unwavering commitment to ethical AI implementation is critical.

Related: Navigating AI Ethics: How Phenom Upholds AI Compliance and Legislation

Clear Value Propositions

Scaling AI requires a clear answer to "why”. For Majid Al Futtaim, AI enables faster hiring, enhanced employee engagement, and cost efficiency while staying true to their values.

“When we say we want to enhance efficiency, improve candidate experience, or foster better decision-making, it’s not just about deploying AI tools,” said Elhosseiny. “It’s about ensuring they simplify processes, personalize interactions, and predict meaningful insights. These principles guide every decision we make with AI.”

AI can also unlock never-imagined creativity. As Elhosseiny noted, “AI gives us the opportunity to push beyond traditional boundaries — not just to streamline processes, but to reimagine them entirely.”

For example, Adidas’ 2024 AI-generated campaign, which leveraged virtual models to market non-existent products was the spark to ignite how brands think about creative automation’s potential to transform traditional business processes.

Similarly, HR leaders can harness AI to revolutionize processes like workforce planning and engagement, creating transformative and innovative experiences — provided their company is aligned strategically, culturally, and ethically.

Trend 2: High-Volume Hiring is Being Reimagined End-to-End

High-volume hiring, particularly in industries like retail, hospitality, and healthcare, has traditionally focused on speed — often at the expense of the human touch. This year, the process is being redefined to balance efficiency with meaningful experiences.

“High-volume hiring isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution,” cautioned Vert. “To succeed, automation must adapt to the needs of candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters alike.”

Elhosseiny duly noted, “For us, recruitment isn’t just about filling roles — it’s about staying true to our values: being bold, passionate, and together.”

At every step, Majid Al Futtaim ensures its hiring process reflects its core values. Personalized communication and predictive insights foster connections, ensuring candidates are not only operationally effective but culturally aligned. “When candidates encounter our values from the very first interaction,” said Elhosseiny, “it sets the tone for everything. They’re not just applying for a job — they’re becoming part of something bigger.”

At Majid Al Futtaim, AI helps create a seamless, personalized experience for all stakeholders:

For candidates: Tools like text-to-apply, real-time updates, and automated assessments simplify the application journey while reflecting organizational values.
For hiring managers: Curated, AI-driven insights help managers make informed decisions without being bogged down by administrative tasks.
For recruiters: Automation takes care of repetitive workflows like scheduling, enabling recruiters to focus on building relationships and resolving bottlenecks.

The impact is undeniable. “We’ve reduced our time to hire by 30% with AI,” Elhosseiny shared. “We’ve also seen a 96% adoption rate among our hiring teams. This shows that the technology isn’t just effective but also intuitive and empowering for everyone involved. AI has also driven a significant improvement in the quality of hires, ensuring that every new team member aligns with our culture and contributes to our vision.”

Trend 3: Skills Ontologies are Becoming the Foundation for Talent Strategy

According to the World Economic Forum, 44% of workers’ core skills will change within the next five years. With nearly all workplaces acknowledging the critical role of skills in talent management, it’s clear that embracing skills-based hiring frameworks is no longer optional — it’s essential.

By starting to map workforce capabilities to business objectives, Majid Al Futtaim hopes to eventually empower employees to see clear growth pathways — critical for engagement and retention.

At the heart of this transformation are skills ontologies — a unified framework connecting roles, career paths, and workforce planning for:

Smarter hiring that focuses on transferable skills over rigid qualifications
Personalized development that tailors growth paths to employees’ potential
Strategic planning that maps skills to align with evolving business goals

“The shift to a skills-based model isn’t about technology alone — it’s about uniting talent acquisition, performance management, and learning on a cohesive framework,” shared Vert. By prioritizing skills ontologies as one of the key HR trends to follow, companies create a future-ready workforce while inspiring employees to grow alongside the business.

Trend 4: Agentic AI is Emerging as the Next Frontier in Career Development

Career development has long been a challenge for organizations and employees alike. Traditional approaches often lack transparency and personalization, leaving employees unsure of their growth opportunities. Enter agentic AI — an HR trend that actualizes career development with dynamic, hyper-personalized guidance along the way.

Unlike traditional tools, agentic AI learns from user interactions and adapts in real-time to simplify processes and provide actionable steps for employees to navigate their future at a company with confidence. Working within an internal Talent Marketplace, agentic AI can offer:

Clear growth paths, mapping and different career opportunities (gigs, L&D courses, mentorships, and more) to individual skills
24/7 accessibility, empowering employees to explore growth options on their terms, when it’s convenient for them
Data-driven insights, providing actionable recommendations to both HR and employees.

“AI agents aren’t about replacing human connection. They’re about enabling people to see their career path clearly and take charge of their journey,” explained Elhosseiny. Instead of just telling employees “they’re empowered”, AI agents can truly empower them.

“These tools dynamically adapt, delivering career development plans like never before,” shared Vert. By automating routine queries, HR teams can focus on mentoring and strategic priorities, creating a culture of ownership and engagement.

Your 2025 AI Action Plan

To transform your own HR operations while elevating the human experience, keep these priorities in mind:

Scale AI strategically: Focus on data readiness, governance, and measurable goals
Reimagine high-volume hiring: Combine automation with cultural alignment for efficient, meaningful hiring
Embrace skills ontologies: Build a skills-first framework to align workforce capabilities with evolving business needs
Empower employees with agentic AI: Simplify processes and provide personalized career growth opportunities

Help make 2025 the year HR stops asking if AI will work and starts asking how we can make it work better.

Ready to actualize these HR trends? Join us at IAMPHENOM to learn how — or schedule time to chat with one of our team members!

Apurba