Artificial intelligence is changing not just how HR professionals work, but also the boundaries of what they work on. Data from OpenAI shows that HR professionals are increasingly using ChatGPT for tasks associated with other functions, with marketing emerging as the most common area of crossover.
OpenAI’s analysis of more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages found that 69% of occupation-specific messages from HR professionals were connected to work typically associated with another occupation. Marketing accounted for 23% of these tasks, followed by engineering at 18% and finance at 16%. The findings point to a broader shift in which AI is enabling professionals to take on tasks that previously required support or handoffs from specialist teams.
The crossover is particularly relevant to HR because the function increasingly intersects with communications, employer branding, recruitment marketing, analytics and employee engagement. With generative AI able to assist with drafting campaigns, creating job descriptions, developing internal communications, analysing information and preparing presentations, HR teams can now handle parts of this work themselves. What once moved between HR, marketing, communications and other departments can increasingly be completed within a single workflow.
The trend also raises questions about the skills organisations will expect from HR leaders. As AI reduces the friction involved in performing adjacent tasks, functional expertise may no longer be enough. HR professionals will increasingly need to understand technology, data, communication and business strategy alongside their traditional people responsibilities. The value of AI, therefore, may lie less in automating HR processes and more in expanding what HR teams are capable of doing.
OpenAI’s findings suggest that this is part of a wider transformation in the workplace, where AI is making occupational boundaries more fluid. For HR, the development could accelerate the shift from a function focused primarily on people processes to one that operates more directly across the broader business.
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