This white-paper highlights the need for HR and TA leaders to embrace conversational AI powered by smart chat as the future of HR. The changing talent landscape, worker flexibility, and greater levels of automation with AI are some of the forces challenging HR and TA leaders to innovate and stay ahead of talent trends. It also outlines the old-school HR thinking, which includes asymmetry in people data, people data analysis paralysis, no personalization, top-down decision making, emphasis on one size fits all processes, and simple chatbots automating Q&A tasks. We connect the dots between the changing talent landscape, advances in conversational AI, and the need for smart chat built on ethical AI that truly connects and understands candidates from the start as the future of HR.