Gartner has started assessing Applied AI separately in its Critical Capabilities work for HCM.
That reflects where the market's got to. AI is now in recruitment, service delivery, manager support and workforce decisions, which puts it inside the core processes rather than alongside them.
If you're heading into an HCM selection, the question is what goes into the requirements pack.
Whether you build it internally or bring in an advisor, the AI section often carries over from the last selection. A handful of general questions written before much of this was actually in the product.
We're reworking our own template to reflect that evolution.
What you need on record is what the product's actually doing, what data it uses, where a person still makes the decision, what's configurable, and what's live today rather than sitting on the roadmap.
An analyst rating tells you a vendor has capability. It doesn't tell you what's switched on in your region, in your tenant, under your configuration.
The rest of the HCM requirements still matter.
But AI now needs to show up properly in the scoring, the demonstration scripts and the evidence you ask vendors to produce.