Artificial intelligence is helping companies across industries answer human resources-related questions, automate some HR tasks and suggest jobs to prospective candidates. In the future, the technology will become even more common in hiring and recruiting, executives say.

“It’s pervasive in all aspects of how we think about people, getting the right people on the right projects and building careers,” said Jeff Wong, chief innovation officer for Ernst & Young, which brands itself as EY.

EY in 2017 launched an AI-powered chatbot named “Goldie” that has answered more than 2.2 million questions for employees across 138 countries to date. Now, the company, which hires about 65,000 people annually, is considering ways to use artificial intelligence to help human resources staff select qualified candidates. “We’re trying to be particularly thoughtful about how we apply AI in this particular circumstance,” Mr. Wong said. Emphasis on diversity, inclusion and fairness are requirements for such an AI system, he said.

Eventually, AI could offer personalized recommendations for training programs that could be useful for career development, Mr. Wong said. It could also suggest which employees should be assigned to specific teams, in order to get the highest-performing teams possible, he said.

About 23% of organizations using some artificial intelligence said they were doing so in the human resources and recruiting domain, according to a 2018 Gartner Inc. study of about 850 respondents in the U.S. and Canada.