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The ubiquitous presence of artificial intelligence in staffing

Staffing Industry Review

The ubiquitous presence of artificial intelligence in staffing

John Nurthen
| January 21, 2025
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To prepare you for the upcoming year, SIA has identified some trends we believe will make a significant impact on the staffing market. Our Staffing Trends 2025 research report highlights three aspects of artificial intelligence that will present new challenges and opportunities for staffing firms: the development of Agentic AI and what that might mean for the labor market, the introduction of legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, and the pervasive nature of AI which is now impacting every department within a staffing firm.  

Why are we focusing so intently on this technology? As SIA research reflects, we have reached a point where AI is becoming ubiquitous throughout the entire staffing organization.

Every department can use AI to improve processes, either by making them quicker, less expensive, more accurate, less biased or more informative — or maybe all  in combination. Meanwhile, AI can also empower the C-suite to be more effective.

Digital transformation is now a holistic exercise. It should not only be limited to external interactions with candidates and clients.

chart listing AI use cases in staffing, by department

Here are use cases SIA has identified through its research.

Executive team. The use of AI-driven performance dashboards can make busy staffing executives’ administrative tasks more effective and efficient by providing additional depth to company analysis, more-readily identifying market trends, interpreting benchmarks and even predicting future outcomes. More mundane tasks such as compliance monitoring can also be automated providing staffing executives with more time to focus on strategic development and interpersonal tasks. When AI is widely available to support the managerial process, managers have more time to spend being human.

Sales and business development. We have seen many new technologies enhance interactions with customers, chatbots being perhaps the most visible. But it does not stop there. Advanced customer relationship management tools now include AI-powered lead scoring and account optimization through the identification of patterns in customer behavior. This enables sales and business development teams to personalize interactions, optimize pathways and better anticipate customer needs. AI can also be used to optimize pricing models in a variety of ways, including the adjustment of prices in real time, the automation of routine pricing tasks, personalized pricing strategies and promotional campaign targeting.

Talent acquisition. For those focused on recruiting, there has been no shortage of innovation in candidate acquisition technology. Every aspect of candidate acquisition can now be enhanced through AI from automated candidate sourcing and passive candidate insights to more sophisticated matching, and more streamlined candidate engagement through chatbots of various types, including the more recent innovation in voice bots.

Finance and payroll. The finance team is also able to benefit from artificial intelligence. AI can be deployed to create real-time dashboards providing insights on payroll data including trends, anomalies, and potential issues. The dashboards can help track key payroll performance indicators, such as processing time, error rates, and compliance levels. Transaction audits can be automated in order to identify anomalies and fraud detection, compliance verification, and customer alerts, alongside chatbot functionality to resolve payroll and billing inquiries. AI can also be used as an important component of cash-flow forecasting and the budgeting process. Gartner predicts that 50% of organizations will use AI to replace “time-consuming bottom-up forecasting approaches” by 2028. Generative AI prompts for finance are also making financial reporting faster and more effective by automating numerous routine tasks, enabling deeper data analysis and improving the overall decision-making process.

Marketing. AI can benefit marketing in many ways, including more targeted outreach, optimized advertising spend, programmatic job advertising, behavioral insights, dynamic content creation and competitor analysis. AI can analyze data to identify patterns and trends, which can help marketers anticipate consumer behavior and market changes. It can help marketers personalize content and experiences at scale and generate content automatically based on user preferences and external data. AI tools can analyze large datasets to create metrics which help marketers better understand what makes their target audience click.

Information technology. Lastly, but by no means least, the IT department can harness AI for workflow automation, network optimization, improved system monitoring, enhanced cybersecurity, code generation and service desk automation for larger staffing organizations. Of course, the IT team also has an important role to play in ensuring AI is used ethically and legally across the whole staffing organization.

Artificial intelligence has now reached a stage where it has the potential to be pervasive throughout every part of a staffing firm. Such a transformation may afford many advantages — but it does not come without risk.

This, and other important trends, can be found in SIA’s popular Staffing Trends 2025 research report.


For a deep dive into ways articifial intelligence is being used in staffing, refer to these SIA reports: