Work Slop: What SHRM's Research Says About AI Guardrails and the Skills Gap

A little less than half of workers now use AI regularly on the job. Of that group, 44% admit the output looks finished on the surface and holds nothing underneath. SHRM has a name for it: work slop.

Dr. James Atkinson is VP of Thought Leadership at SHRM, where he leads the research teams behind that finding. He spent nine years at Gartner, finishing as Managing Vice President of Data Products for its HR research practice, and ran data products at Payscale before joining SHRM.

James walks through SHRM's Skills Revolution research in this conversation. Read the full report here: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/research/skills-revolution-preparing-employees-tomorrows-jobs

In this episode, he covers:

• Why CFOs approve people investments framed as productivity gained and cost avoided, and why SHRM's navigating the C-suite research found finance leaders want that case backed by workforce data

• How 44% of AI users admit to producing work slop, and where HR can step in to define what good output looks like

• What SHRM's Skills Revolution research says about learning and development systems that can't track how fast skills are changing

Timestamps

[00:01:01] Why the labor market is uneven rather than hot or cold, and why the last two months shouldn't set your expectations

[00:01:51] Healthcare keeps adding jobs as the population ages while federal employment declines and local government picks back up

[00:03:13] Framing a people investment as a business opportunity with a productivity number and a cost number attached

[00:04:49] SHRM's navigating the C-suite research: CFOs want the ROI spelled out and backed by workforce data