Advancer: AI in Human Resource Management

In August 2024, Ceri and Llew Jury, founders of Advancer Group (Advancer), an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered human resource (HR) advisory firm based in Brisbane, Australia, opened a bottle of wine to celebrate the successful relaunch of their business. Advancer had operated as a traditional HR advisory business since 2015 and had helped more than 100 clients solve complex HR challenges that were often directly tied to businesses’ bottom lines and strategies. But as entrepreneurs, Ceri and Llew saw great potential benefit in leveraging AI within organizational HR practices. In addition to providing advice, AI could be integrated to reduce the time and effort spent on standardized tasks by around 80 per cent, resulting in optimized resource allocation and bottom-line efficiencies. Nonetheless, Advancer’s founders had always been strong advocates of retaining the core human element in managing HR. In their vision, AI complemented rather than replaced HR, and it enabled HR practitioners to concentrate on their organizations’ most valuable resources: their people. For example, they could give more focus to building relationships, solving critical people problems, thinking and acting strategically, fostering innovative internal processes, and strengthening organizational culture. These were valuable big-ticket items that HR practitioners liked to do but often didn’t have time for.

When the tsunami of AI advancement arrived in 2022, Ceri and Llew realized that this was the moment they had been waiting for. Their innovative vision of how to unburden practitioners from repetitive routine tasks and create space for what mattered could soon become reality. Since early 2024, Advancer had offered HR CoPilot, Australia’s first AI-powered HR advice assistant, which elevated strategic HR management to support business success while capitalizing on the capabilities of the latest technologies.

However, while Advancer’s mission appeared straightforward and transparent, potential customers’ reactions ranged from extreme excitement to deep skepticism. Ceri and Llew noticed that potential clients were asking a variety of questions, which differed depending on the person’s position in the organization. This was particularly evident within the most lucrative group of prospective clients, the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that employed teams of HR practitioners and managers. While the Jurys knew their product was trustworthy, accommodating the numerous distinct perspectives on the client side became consistently challenging when they pitched their product or in subsequent conversations, creating a conundrum that seemed to negatively affect potential clients’ perceptions of their product’s unique selling proposition. With the quarterly meeting of Advancers’ new advisory board coming up in a couple of weeks, the imminent challenge was to strategize how the business could best meet the varied interests and concerns of all potential stakeholders.