Healthcare HR leaders call AI the most overhyped trend in their field. They also call it the tool they are most eager to put to work — just not for hiring.
Becker’s connected with two hospital and health system chief human resources officers who said no algorithm can screen for culture, empathy or compassion, and that the promise of AI as a people-selection tool outpaces what the technology can actually deliver. Where they see real opportunity is narrower and more practical: getting routine administrative work off their teams’ plates so people can focus on people.
Heather Milicevic, vice president and CHRO of Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, acknowledged that AI has genuine value in HR: “It can speed up scheduling, sort through high volumes of applications and take routine administrative work off our recruiters’ plates,” she said. The idea that it can identify the right healthcare employee, however, is where she sees the hype outrunning reality.
“AI can screen for credentials and keywords. It cannot screen for culture, empathy or compassion, and in healthcare, those qualities matter most,” Ms. Milicevic said. “We can teach skills. We cannot teach someone to care.”
The argument she made is grounded in what patients carry away from a care encounter. Every touchpoint — the person at the front desk, the nurse at the bedside, the staff member who stops in a hallway to give directions — shapes how people experience their care.
“No algorithm can replicate that, and no algorithm can tell us in advance who will do it well,” she said. “That judgment still takes people: interviewers who know our culture and can recognize those qualities in a candidate.”
Shana Scales, CHRO of Lake Charles (La.) Memorial Health System, arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle. Ms. Scales centered her concern on when AI is positioned as a replacement for people rather than a support for them.
“Healthcare is built on human relationships, and employees still want to feel valued, heard and connected,” she said. “Technology can support our work, but it cannot replace the human touch that drives trust, engagement, and job satisfaction.”
Both CHROs pointed to the same corrective: use AI to reduce administrative burden and reinvest that time in human connection. Ms. Milicevic described a team that, with reduced paperwork and routine tasks, can spend more time on conversations that matter. She cited a 92% new-hire onboarding satisfaction rating as evidence that this approach is working. Ms. Scales pointed to the ability to allow leaders to spend more time connecting with employees.
“The future is not about replacing people with technology; it is about using technology to enhance the employee experience,” she said.
That view — AI as a tool for freeing human capacity, not replacing it — has become a consistent refrain across healthcare leadership, and CHROs are increasingly the ones being asked to define where the line falls. Peter Adebi, senior vice president and CHRO at Cincinnati Children’s, told Becker’s in September that the labor question has fundamentally changed.
“You’re a chief human resources officer. Labor was human. The question was, how do we get that labor? Do we build? Do we buy? Do we rent labor?” Mr. Adebi said. “Now, it’s a little bit more. We’re partnering with machines, and we’re going deep into this work.”
The implication is not that human labor is disappearing, but that the job of managing it now extends to decisions it never had to make before — including what rights and oversight AI should have in employment decisions.
Amy Linsin, executive vice president and CHRO at Greenville, S.C.-based Prisma Health, also said in September that those decisions require HR at the table before implementation, not after.
“HR needs a strategic role when planning human-AI collaboration because these efforts stretch beyond immediate IT and operational concerns,” Ms. Linsin said — a position that echoes what Ms. Milicevic and Ms. Scales described from the hiring side: that human judgment cannot be an afterthought in decisions AI is being asked to inform.
That concern has reached the CEO level as well. Health system leaders told Becker’s in August that the most dangerous version of AI in healthcare is not the technology itself but the assumption that adopting it is sufficient on its own. Joe Avelino, CEO of Long Beach, Calif.-based College Medical Center, grounded the argument in what patients remember.
“AI cannot replace the healing power of a compassionate physician, a reassuring nurse, a dedicated social worker, or a sitter who simply sits quietly with someone during their darkest moment,” Mr. Avelino said. “Our patients may not always remember their diagnosis or the medication we prescribed but they will remember how we made them feel and whether they were treated with dignity, respect, and compassion.”
It is the same case Ms. Milicevic made about candidate screening — that healthcare’s defining qualities are precisely the ones no algorithm can evaluate — applied now to the care encounter itself.
