Susan spent 15 years in human resources at Amazon. When she started, HR was about people — conversations, investigations, finding solutions that worked for both employees and the company. By the time she left, the department had been rebranded as 'People Experience and Technology' (PXT), and the 'technology' part was rapidly taking over.
"We were told when we started projects, 'Here's the end game: We want to remove site HR as much as possible. We want everything to be self-service — because it's just not scalable to hire as many people as they were hiring for each of the warehouses.'"
She saw it happen in real time. Her investigations team — the people who looked into harassment claims, workplace disputes, accommodation requests — shrank from over 100 people to closer to 20. AI tools automated case triage, document review, even initial recommendations. The remaining staff was handling more volume than ever before, with fewer people.
"It is scary to see how well it worked," she said. "I actually have spent the last year thinking, 'Are there going to be any HR roles in five years?'"
The impact on warehouse workers was even more stark. Night-shift employees like Laura at an Ohio warehouse found that dedicated HR teams had been whittled down or eliminated. When Laura needed bereavement leave after her cousin died, the AI app demanded a death certificate she didn't have, stalling the time off. A medical leave turned into a month-long ordeal as the system repeatedly requested more paperwork.
"Now it's like HR is there on banking hours," Laura said. "On night shifts, we're lucky to see them one day a week."
April Watson suffered a concussion on the job and submitted the required paperwork, but the AI chatbot produced the wrong medical form and her restrictions weren't approved for over a month. While she waited, she was disciplined for performance issues caused by her injury.
Courtney Badger, another HR professional laid off in 2024, saw her team's case-closure quota quadruple after automation was introduced. "I watched the 'human' get sucked out of the job in the short amount of time that I was there," she said. The company's stated rationale for her layoff was that AI made it possible to operate with fewer people.
For Susan, the question isn't whether AI will continue to transform HR — it already has. The question is what happens when the people who design the systems forget that HR was never meant to be purely transactional. That sometimes, what an employee needs most isn't a chatbot or an automated form. It's another human being on the other end of the conversation.