CAN AI CHOOSE YOUR HR TECH YET? GETTING THERE(MOSTLY)….

March 9, 2026
6:40 pm

AI vs Human Analysts in HRIS Selection

Last year we tried AI out on a client HRIS selection request to see how good it could be and tested the findings against our own HRSoftwareFinder ratings. We revisited the exercise to see if AI had improved over the past 7 months.

The Assignment

A UK company with 550 employees (factory and office-based) needed the following:

A cloud-based HR system with self-service, performance management, organisation charts and reporting.
A payroll module with online payslips and weekly & monthly pay frequencies.
A time management module that captures time for factory and office-based employees as well as hybrid and remote workers.
A recruitment module that handles aspects such as populating job boards and social media, interview scheduling and routing applications to hiring managers.
A learning module (a desirable option later on) that would enable them to create their own training and onboarding materials.

We were asked for a shortlist of five solutions for the above requirements, so we asked several AI tools to do the same.

We checked with seven popular AI applications. Manus was having an off day previously and did not participate, but this time it took part.

Evaluation Method

Using the HRSF (HRSoftwareFinder) ratings, we began with a long list of 12 contenders.

The scoring system was as follows:

5 points for any of our top 6 choices.
2 points for any from our 7–12 selections.
Maximum possible score: 25 points.

Results – Previous Test

ChatGPT – 19/25 (Winner)
Gemini – 8/25
Claude – 8/25
Perplexity – 8/25
DeepSeek – 4/25
Bing Co-Pilot – 2/25

Results – Latest Test

ChatGPT – 19/25
Claude – 19/25
Manus – 19/25
Gemini – 12/25
Perplexity – 11/25
DeepSeek – 6/25
Bing Co-Pilot – 5/25

AI Selections

ChatGPT

Zellis HCM Cloud
MHR iTrent
IRIS Cascade
Access People XD
Cezanne HR

Gemini

MHR iTrent
Ciphr
Zellis
HiBob
Moorepay

Claude

Ciphr
Dayforce
MHR iTrent
Cezanne HR
IRIS Cascade

Perplexity

Ciphr
Access People
IRIS Staffology
HiBob
Bright HR

DeepSeek

Access
Ciphr
Personio
HiBob
Kallidus

Bing Co-Pilot

Rippling
Workday
UKG Pro
SAP SuccessFactors
BambooHR

Manus

MHR iTrent
Access PeopleXD
Ciphr
Zellis HCM Cloud
IRIS Cascade

Observations

ChatGPT has maintained its consistency, Claude has demonstrated a significant leap in accuracy, and Manus (a recent Meta acquisition) has shown that it can be a strong contender.

Perplexity continues to make progress, but Bing is still far behind. Two of its recommendations were significantly out of scale. DeepSeek shows promise but made one choice that was outside the scope of the specification.

What surprised our analysts were several obvious omissions, including Sage People, Frontier Software iChris, ADP, People XCD and Employment Hero.

As yet, the 75 percent accuracy barrier has not been breached, but it is likely only a matter of time. One line of thought that our human analysts have identified has not yet been picked up by the AI tools, which means that, for now, human analysts are still ahead of the game.