Trust influence on AI HR tools perceived usefulness in Swiss HRM: the mediating roles of perceived fairness and privacy concerns

Abstract This study looks at factors influencing, first, trust in artificial intelligence (AI) systems in human resources management, second, perceived usefulness of these tools. Based on a survey experiment provided to 324 private and public Swiss HR professionals’, it first explores how some trust in automation framework’s predictors are related to trust in HR AI tools and, then, how this trust is in return related to UTAUT’s perceived usefulness of these AI-enhanced tools. To do this, the following article is based on a PLS-SEM structural equation model. Its main findings are that reliability, familiarity, intention of developers and propensity to trust are directly positively related to trust in the HR AI tools studied here. Nevertheless, public employees declare more negative feelings toward AI in HRM. Indeed, the latter systematically have less trust in HR AI than private employees. However, public sector employees do not find them any less useful or efficient than private sector employees, except when it comes to the HR AI tools used to assess employee performance and behavior. In addition to this, trust in these tools is systematically positively linked to their perceived usefulness. This influence is partly mediated by the perceived decision fairness of our tools, but not by the absence of privacy concerns associated with them. This said, this article makes a significant contribution to the literature about private and public actors’ perceptions of nascent HR AI-enhanced tools.