MONOGRAPHY: Artificial Intelligence in Human Resource Management: Evidence from Slovak Enterprises

Artificial intelligence (AI) is diffusing unevenly across the functional architecture of the enterprise, and human resource management (HRM) occupies a distinctive place in that diffusion: it is simultaneously a promising field for automation and augmentation and the function in which algorithmic decision-making touches people most directly. This monograph provides a comprehensive, multi-angle empirical account of AI adoption in HRM among enterprises operating in Slovakia, a Central and Eastern European (CEE) economy that is under-represented in the international evidence base. Drawing on the AI-IMPACT organization-level survey (N = 816 enterprises; 562 current AI users), it concentrates on the 100 enterprises that reported implementing or testing AI in human resources and integrates four analytical perspectives into a single narrative: (1) the positioning of HR among functional domains and the firm-level determinants of HR-AI adoption; (2) the internal application architecture of AI in HR across twelve specific functions and five adoption stages; (3) the perceived benefit–risk calculus through which firms appraise AI in HR; and (4) the employment correlates of HR-AI adoption. 

Four findings are central. First, HR is a second-wave functional domain. It ranks fifth of nine areas (17.8% of the 562 AI users; 12.3% of all firms), behind marketing, operations, logistics and R&D, and the firm-level factor most strongly associated with HR-AI adoption is the breadth of a company’s wider AI programme (adjusted odds ratio = 1.48 per additional functional area, p < .001) rather than its size, ownership or sector. Second, the application picture is broad but shallow. The twelve HR functions behave as one coherent engagement construct (Cronbach’s α = .914), with a secondary and more tentative split between talent-acquisition and workforce-analytics uses; deployment, however, sits mostly at the pilot or planning stage. Only 29 of the 100 firms use any HR function actively and regularly, and 20 have nothing yet beyond planning. Third, firms read AI in HR with ambivalence rather than as a trade-off. The perceived significance of benefits (M = 3.59) and of risks (M = 3.50) is statistically indistinguishable; the two are positively correlated (r = .41, 95% CI [.20, .61], a correlation that survives adjustment for response style) and form separate factors. The largest single group of firms is the ambivalent one, high on both (39%), and these firms show the deepest adoption. Greater adoption intensity is associated with perceived benefits and organizational maturity, and shows no association with perceived risks. Fourth, on employment, HR-AI adoption is associated with neither higher AI-related layoffs (realized or planned; 9% vs. 11%, n.s.) nor higher manager-perceived employee concern. New-role creation is lower among HR-AI firms, though the gap is only borderline once other factors are held constant (12% vs. 21%; adjusted OR = 0.53, p = .055). The employment profile is one of cautious augmentation, not substitution. 

The monograph contributes the first organization-level, function-resolved portrait of AI in HRM for Slovakia and, to our knowledge, among the first for the CEE region; an empirically grounded account of how firms hold benefits and risks together rather than trading them off; and a readiness-centred reading in which organizational maturity, dedicated AI budgets and the breadth of the AI programme, far more than demographic firm characteristics, accompany whether and how deeply AI enters the HR function. Implications for managers, HR professionals and CEE technology policy are developed, and the limitations of cross-sectional, single-informant, screened-sample evidence are discussed at length. 

Authors:

Peter Štetka & Filip Stovíček