Integrating AI into People Analytics: A Review of Current Practices, Ethical Considerations, and Organizational Implications

Abstract

Human Resource analytics is moving at an accelerated pace with the introduction and potential of AI in people analytics. Despite this growth, the field has been fragmented, with technical studies, ethical critiques, and organizational analyses growing in parallel streams with little theoretical connection. To find gaps in literature, we first conducted a traditional literature review on three databases (Scopus, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar). After merging 607 raw records and using a five-step PRISMA-style screening procedure, a total of 453 published, peer-reviewed works were retained for thematic synthesis published between 2019 and 2026. The analysis reveals three key findings. In particular, current AI-supported solutions practiced by companies in attrition, recruitment, and engagement are heavily dependent on predictive modeling (48 percent of the corpus). Second, ethical and human-centric issues were severely underrepresented at less than 10 percent of the included papers, but 44 ethical works accounted for 28 percent of the reference corpus, with three of the fifteen most cited foundational papers dealing with algorithmic bias, virtue ethics, and the dangers of people analytics. Third, the organizational implications account for 27 percent of the corpus, a period of rapid growth since 2023, a harbinger of an emerging transition from algorithm-centered to organization-centered framing. Incorporating these findings, the paper proposes a Three-Pillar Integrated Framework, under which ethical safeguards are framed not as an impediment to analytical practice, but as a precondition for sustained organizational impact. The framework further identifies emerging-market contexts, in particular Southeast Asia, as a relatively under-researched research frontier, with fewer than ten studies from Indonesia mentioned in the corpus despite the swift expansion of AI-driven human resource technologies among the region's practitioners.