Anna Carlsson has watched Nordic organizations move fast on AI curiosity and slow on almost everything else. As an HR technology analyst based in Stockholm, she says the real constraint is culture, specifically whether employees trust the organization enough to actually try something new. Six conversations recorded at HR Tech Europe this spring reveal that people are comfortable with AI, but organizations aren’t quite ready to build it into how people work.
The interviews, recorded live at the RAI Amsterdam show floor for 2026 Top 100 HR Tech Influencer Matt Alder’s Recruiting Future podcast, offer a picture of where AI adoption actually stands in HR and talent functions:
Culture is the starting point for AI adoption
Carlsson said AI has changed the pace and depth of tech-related interest inside HR. Even so, she suggested that most conversations have hit a similar stalling point. “The thing about how to take AI and make it productive in your organization is moving from just knowing to doing something,” she said, describing a panel where she tried to steer participants toward talking about data infrastructure. “We’re not really there yet.”
Her advice to organizations starting out was to build psychological safety before building capability. “You have to have trust in how you can do it or feel that secure space,” Carlsson said. “It’s a lot about culture, to dare to try things.” She described the companies she sees succeeding as taking a “guerrilla approach,” giving employees dedicated time and permission to test AI tools rather than issuing top-down mandates.
Foundation before agents
The misalignment between pilot and practice showed up in Höjwall’s conversation about H&M Group’s agentic AI work. Höjwall, who leads global HR digitalization for the company, said most large organizations are still deploying agents one at a time against narrow tasks, rather than integrating them across the employee lifecycle. “How are they connected? How are they creating a cohesive experience?” she said.
Getting past that stage requires a stable data foundation before any of the more visible agent work can happen, according to Höjwall. Aligning how data gets entered across a global organization, so that “apples are compared to apples,” is unglamorous work that has to happen before agents can be trusted to act on it, she said. Even then, most companies still lack what she called a “super agent,” an orchestrating layer able to coordinate narrower agents and hold a process together end to end, a concept she credited to analyst Josh Bersin.
Harris, whose firm runs the longest-running HR systems survey in the market, now in its 29th year, described the same fragmentation at the market level. She said buyers are tired of being told they need either a single unified system or a collection of best-of-breed tools. “Neither of those models has worked,” she said. Sapient Insights has instead tracked the emergence of what Harris calls a platform cluster model: anchor systems built around a company’s core priorities, connected to marketplaces and ecosystems of smaller tools around them, with data moving between clusters rather than living in one place.
Harris said 81% of HR professionals report using AI personally, but that figure drops to about 36% once AI is embedded into actual workforce processes, rising to 45% at organizations with more than 5,000 employees. “HR knows their compliance better than anyone else,” Harris said. “They’re not out there putting personal information on those tools, but they are leveraging it to redo their emails, to rethink their approach to their strategies, to build out business plans.” She said she expects a 10%-15% increase in workflow-level adoption in 2026 and cautioned against reading the slower pace as reluctance, since employee-facing processes require more scrutiny of data use and regional compliance than personal use does.
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What happens when the foundation gets skipped
Harris and Höjwall both pushed back on the narrative connecting AI directly to layoffs. “It’s not that they’re getting the outcomes from AI yet,” Harris said. “What they are banking on is that they will eventually get those outcomes, and they have to pay for the investment in AI somehow.” Because the HR line item is typically an organization’s largest cost center, boards are pressuring leaders to fund AI investment by cutting headcount rather than waiting for productivity gains to materialize, she said.
Höjwall described large corporations both over-governing AI, which pushes employees toward unsanctioned shadow AI use instead of sanctioned tools, and under-preparing before cutting headcount. “Management or management consultants supporting management come in and decide that, ‘Hey, we’re going to reduce this department by 20%.’ And then they quote AI, and then they go out and make people redundant,” she said, adding that she does not recommend that approach.
Both pointed to IKEA‘s customer service redesign as the alternative. Harris said the company moved 8,500 employees off routine advisory work into a design services unit that now generates $1.3 billion in revenue, without a layoff. “That’s what the real future looks like if they’re doing it right,” she said. Höjwall cited the same redeployment as the model she wants more companies to follow.
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The market isn’t making this easier
Brickwedde, who tracks recruiting trends across thousands of companies in the DACH region, said the labor market has become genuinely contradictory. “It’s a paradox situation,” he said. “On the one side you have too many applications, the application tsunami, and on the other hand you have too low numbers of applications. So you have scarcity, and you have a surplus market at the same time.” He attributed the split to weak economic conditions pushing employers to cut easily reversible spending, such as marketing and some HR roles, while demographic change simultaneously drains specialist talent that is hard to replace.
Brickwedde was skeptical that most AI vendors are addressing the problems employers actually have. “Some vendors have very good solutions but haven’t addressed it to the pain points,” he said, describing conversations where he had to ask vendors directly what their tools solved for, only to learn the product addressed a much higher-priority problem than the one in their own marketing. He expects the recruiter role to move toward orchestrating AI agents rather than running process steps directly, though he said adoption remains slow.
Dinnen, a recruitment industry analyst, said AI has become inescapable in conference conversation, “almost before we say ‘Hello, my name is.’ ” He pointed to sessions examining where AI agents go wrong in the hiring process, including duplication and compliance risk, as a healthier sign than uncritical hype. He also discussed the five-generation workforce now common across parts of Europe, where traditional retirement is disappearing as older workers choose to keep contributing, sometimes returning to specialist project work after formally retiring.
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HR’s growing responsibility
Ünlü, a global HR transformation leader and HR tech investor recently transitioning out of Novartis, argued the moment is elevating HR’s role. “The world needs HR more than ever,” he said, describing boardrooms turning to HR leaders for support with disruption that goes beyond any single technology.
His concern was that the function lacks the depth to meet the moment. “We need more depth, more smart people, more strategic people,” he said, pointing to HR operations and payroll data as an underused source of board-level insight. Asked what changes he foresees in the next six to 12 months, Ünlü said HR leaders will need to define how to lead teams that blend human and AI agent workers, something he said felt unthinkable a year ago.
Stacey Harris will bring her research to HR Tech 2026 in Las Vegas, Oct. 20-22 at Mandalay Bay, where HR leaders and analysts will dig further into where AI adoption stands and what’s still holding it back. Registration and full agenda details are available at hrtechnologyconference.com.
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