It’s not yet Halloween, but things in the HR world could be summed up as “spooky,” Zach Nunn, CEO of experience management firm Living Corporate, told HR Dive.

U.S. organizations have asked their HR teams to conduct a record number of layoffs this year — often doing so multiple times throughout the course of 2025 in a “serial” fashion, according to a recent Careerminds survey. But while organizations focus on cutting costs through attrition, they also are deprioritizing investments in current staff, according to Nunn.

“The reality is that people initiatives are just not being invested in,” he said. “What we’re seeing is a large-scale divestment from the employee experience in the day-to-day work, and that’s a scary place to be in, because if we’re not going to be investing in people, how do we create healthy experiences for customers?”

HR professionals are feeling squeezed, too, according to a SHRM’s 2025 State of the Workplace report published in March. The association found that 62% of professionals were working beyond their capacity, and 57% said their departments were understaffed.

Industry analysts expected that 2025 would bring its share of challenges, from the push to adopt artificial intelligence, reframe DEI playbooks and adapt talent operations to market fluctuations. More than halfway through the year, those predictions are largely holding true, sources who spoke to HR Dive said, though some trends have taken a few unexpected turns.

The AI hype cycle hits some roadblocks

After years of hype, AI has become increasingly mainstream at work, with a May Owl Labs report finding that 67% of companies integrated AI tools into their organizations for work-related purposes. But there are cracks beginning to show on the adoption front as employers struggle to find good use cases for the technology, said Emily Rose McRae, senior director analyst at Gartner.

A common sticking point is that workers simply don’t have the knowledge to properly use AI, which necessitates additional training. But when leadership teams go to HR with a request to improve training or build employee skill sets to better take advantage of AI, “that is unfortunately not terribly realistic,” McRae said, because the learning curve involved is often too steep.

Generative AI adoption faces other barriers from unclear use cases to meager productivity gains — some vendor estimates show that while the tech can save users minutes of work in a typical day, the tools “don’t have a drastic impact on productivity,” McRae said. As a result, executives are looking to HR to not only identify good use cases for AI but also to upskill workers to ensure uptake is possible in the first place.

“That is really a tricky spot to be in,” McRae said. “HR has a responsibility around training, but it also has a role in reshaping executives’ expectations and getting people to reimagine the outcomes that are possible.”

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