The HR AI Field Guide: A Book for People Who Have a Tuesday, Not an Innovation Lab

The HR AI Field Guide is a 13-chapter book for owners, office managers, HR generalists and one-person HR teams who want to use AI safely and have no innovation lab, no technology budget and no time for a long course. It gives you a pilot you can run in 90 minutes, plain-English terms, ready-to-use prompts, a way to judge vendors, the line you cannot cross in screening and a one-page AI use policy. The Kindle edition is $9.99 and the paperback is $19.99.

The problem this solves: AI is already in your workplace. Your people are using it, vendors are selling it to you and new laws are catching up, yet you have no safe, practical way to start and no one to ask on a Tuesday morning.

How UHR solves it: The HR AI Field Guide on Kindle ($9.99) or in paperback ($19.99) gives you the method, the words, the prompts and the guardrails in one place. When you are ready to turn what you learn into written policy, the California employee handbook template ($149) is where those rules belong.

Why write a book when the internet is full of AI tips?

I wrote it because of a gap I kept seeing. Almost everyone in HR can explain what AI might do someday. Very few can point to one task that now takes less time, one policy that now reads better or one rule that keeps people safe when they use it. That gap is not about intelligence. It is about practice, and small teams feel it most.

Most of what small employers hear about AI comes from people who sell it. Webinars show the best case. Vendor demos show the best case. Social posts show the best case. Nobody shows you a Tuesday, with an inbox, a payroll deadline and a manager who needs a job post by lunch. I grew up in Oakland, and many of the employers I work with have between 10 and 150 people, an owner, an office manager and a pile of work that never ends. They do not need a lecture on the future of work. They need a method they can trust.

The book is that method. It does not ask you to buy anything to start, and it does not ask you to understand how the technology works under the hood. It asks you to run small tests, count what you get back and keep a person in charge of every decision that affects someone’s job, pay or health.

Who is this book for?

It is written for four kinds of readers.

• The owner who answers the phone, signs the checks and also handles the people questions.
• The office manager who inherited payroll, hiring and onboarding because they were organized.
• The HR generalist at a small or mid-size employer who is asked about AI in every meeting and wants a straight answer.
• The one-person HR team who is expected to cover everything and has never had a colleague to compare notes with.

It is aimed at employers with roughly 1 to 150 people. It is written with California employers in mind and names other states where their rules differ. If you have a lawyer, the book helps you ask better questions. If you do not, it helps you avoid the common mistakes. You do not need a technical background to use it, and you do not need to read it in order.

What is the idea underneath the whole book?

One idea runs through every chapter: every HR task falls into one of three zones. In the first zone, AI helps by drafting, organizing and explaining while a person reviews the result. In the second, it assists by preparing material for a human decision. In the third, it does nothing, because a person decides and documents why. If you remember only that, you will avoid most of the mistakes I see.

The book teaches you to sort your own work into those zones before you type a single prompt. I will not hand you the sorting here. The value is in seeing your own tasks land in the right place, with examples drawn from the jobs that fill an HR week.

What will you find inside, without me giving it away?

Here is the shape of the book, told as the questions it answers.

1. Where do I start? The first chapter replaces tip collecting with a pilot you can finish in a morning and measure honestly.
2. What do all these words mean? A chapter of 44 terms, each explained in one or two sentences with the reason HR cares, so you can follow a vendor demo without nodding along.
3. Why do my drafts come back generic? A prompt formula and a review habit that you reuse for every task in the rest of the book.
4. How do I stop retyping the same instructions? Saved assistants, projects and skills your whole team can share.
5. How do I buy without being sold? A short set of vendor questions that separate substance from sales language.
6. Where does it help in a real week? Chapters on meetings, communications, hiring basics, survey comments, training and workforce planning.
7. Where must I stop? A chapter on screening tools and the line you cannot cross, with California, Illinois and Colorado points checked on November 7, 2026.
8. How do I make it official? The guardrails chapter ends with a one-page AI use policy, and the book closes with a 30-day action plan.

Notice what is missing from that list: the formula, the vendor questions, the policy wording and the legal lines. Those are the working parts, and they belong to people who own the book.

What does a chapter actually look like?

Every chapter has the same shape, so you can find what you need in seconds when a job lands on your desk. It opens with a summary you can read in about 20 seconds. It describes the problem and what it costs when it goes wrong. It teaches one idea. It walks you through the steps in plain order. It gives you a prompt you can copy and adapt, a short check of the law and an illustrative scenario that shows the idea at work. Every scenario is made up to teach, and the book says so. None describes a real person or business. Each chapter then closes with a checklist, a template and three steps you can finish this week, each with a time and a finish line. If you only do the three steps, the chapter has paid for itself.

Why does the book spend so much time on the law and on limits?

Because HR touches pay, hiring, discipline and health. Those are the places where a careless tool does real harm, and the rules are moving. Several AI laws take effect in 2027, so the dates matter. The book states its legal points as checked on November 7, 2026, names the sources at the back, and removes anything it could not confirm. It also tells you plainly where a person must decide. A tool that helps you draft a job post is a very different thing from a tool that ranks applicants. The first is a convenience. The second can create legal exposure under California’s civil rights rules for automated decision systems, which I explain in the article on California rules for AI hiring tools. The book gives you the working version of that caution, in the order you meet it on the job.

How is it different from the free articles on this site?

The articles here answer one question at a time. The book is the system. If you have read the AI starter plan for small HR teams and the safe prompt library for HR tasks, you already know my approach. The book puts that approach in sequence, adds the tools you need to carry it out and keeps everything in one place you can mark up, highlight and hand to a coworker. It also gives you a complete prompt library at the back, so you are not hunting through bookmarks when you need a starting point.

Which edition should you choose?

The Kindle edition costs $9.99 and is enrolled in KDP Select, which means it is available on Amazon only. You can read it on a Kindle, a phone, a tablet or a computer. The paperback costs $19.99, uses a 6 by 9 inch format and prints the diagrams in color, which helps when you want to pin a page next to your desk or hand a chapter to a manager. The content is the same in both.

• The HR AI Field Guide, Kindle edition, $9.99
• The HR AI Field Guide, paperback, $19.99

Who should not buy this book?

If you want a technical manual on how language models work, this is not it. If you want a guarantee, it is not that either: the book states plainly that it promises no legal, hiring, retention or time-saving result and that it is not legal advice. If you are looking for a tool that makes people decisions for you, I would argue that is the wrong goal, and the book will tell you why. If you want a careful, practical start that you can finish this month, it was written for you.

What should you do this week?

1. Write down the three HR tasks that cost you the most time last week.
2. Ask each manager which AI tools they already use for work and what they paste into them.
3. Pick the edition that fits how you work, Kindle for today or paperback for your desk, and start with the chapter that matches your most urgent task.
4. Schedule 90 minutes on your calendar for your first pilot and write the one number you will count afterward.

If you want help beyond the book, the HR compliance check-up shows where AI already touches your people decisions, and fractional HR support can help you write and maintain the policy with you.

Sources

• The HR AI Field Guide, Kindle edition, Amazon listing
• The HR AI Field Guide, paperback, Amazon listing
• California Civil Rights Department

McKinley holds a J.D. but is not a licensed attorney. Articles here are general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, talk with an employment attorney.

Data current as of November 2026. Sources are linked where each figure appears.