The biggest change AI brings to HR isn’t the erosion of jobs, but the requirement to raise the bar.

As a HR leader it’s almost impossible not to see AI everywhere you look. No doubt you’ll also be asked your opinion on what this means for skills, talent planning or how you navigate through what feels like a new horizon of work.

I spent the last week or so reading thought leaders on their view of the change and in an attempt to insulate myself from the usual noise of the outside I’ve taken to a plain word document and turned off my distractions. But it did make me think, how many people would just feed a thought into AI and get them to write this article? Is there more value in an opinion based on someone’s own and original thoughts and experiences or is the weight of experience contained within the Large Language Model going to produce something much more polished and valuable for people to read? Well, if you’ve got this far, there’s a chance you’re at least a little interested in a longer-form opinion piece than short, generic ‘AI slop’. But beyond the grim surge of haphazard publication of generic AI content is a real challenge. Yes, workplaces will need to understand how AI changes what they do, but equally HR will have to go through its own transformation if it is to remain relevant, whilst also guiding organisations through a period of great transition. I will position that HR will need to have three main areas of focus, then look at the overall operating model and finally and I will also suggest the skills that I think will become more valuable and perhaps areas that the profession will need to sharpen its pencil.

1.      Supporting the great transition

Understanding AI, how it impacts the organisation you work in and what this means for jobs, skills and the future organisational design is going to be critical. Let me be clear in my suggestion; reorganisation will happen. Whether HR gets a seat at that discussion table at the design stage is going to depend on the literacy with which they can talk about the interface of employee culture with organisational design. How fluently and credibly they can articulate how learning and skill development will form part of the essential journey and what structures make the organisation go faster, not slow down.

If there’s a failure to be able to talk about this not just in the stories and experience, but also in data, including financial data, then it’s likely the role will be demoted to expert executors (pardon the potential grim pun) rather than strategic partners. Getting into the conversation at the front of this process will also determine what happens in the future.

There’s also something to consider here, many organisations are making people moves well before they’re ready to really understand or leverage. In fact, according to research from Gartner many CEO’s are reducing the size of the workforce before they truly understand what benefits (or changes) might occur in the workplace. The CIPD articulates the challenge well and actually describes 6 potential outcomes for AI in an organisation, namely:

·         Intensification – increasing the pace of work

·         Substitution – replacing someone with the new tools

·         Transference – it shifts the work to someone else

·         Telepresence – it enables people to work from anywhere

·         Creation – it develops new roles and opportunities

·         Augmentation – it supports what they currently do

The likelihood is that it’s going to be a combination of the above for an organisation, however what is clear is that it’s going to have a profound impact not just on the amount of work, but how and by who (or what) that work is going to be delivered. Without a plan of how to get from operating model A to an obscure and murky picture of model B when considering skills, capacity, change management as well as overlaying considerations about the culture, employee wellbeing and some of the potential negative impact from AI (see AI Slop) this new world will bring and the type of organisation you will become.

It’s a lot to consider, but I believe that unless a rounded people professional (with good organisational design and development skills) is involved early on there will be a lot of backpaddling in the future when the gamble on the perceived benefits of AI don’t quite land as we’d expect.

2.      PeopleOps

This is an area which I believe will be the most impacted by the advent of AI based technology. Think chatbots answering questions about annual leave and policy, think automated processes and streamlined documentation and compliance, HR or PeopleOps leaders will focus on trimming cost, enhancing efficiency and being lean. To do this they’ll need to become technologists themselves, understanding what technology to deploy (and when) as well as being incredibly data fluent. They’ll need to design AI workflows, build internal knowledge models (especially difficult in an era when more and more people will be turning to AI for their information before internal tools) and importantly, establish governance guardrails.

I see a world in which the operations function will be the ‘engine’ which can clearly not just read data, but understand statistical bias, stress data and use assumptions and patterns in the data to help predict the future. Ironically the PeopleOps role is going to feel much less ‘peopley’. Data has long not been a strong point for HR teams but get this right and move not just into analytics, but full data science and I believe it can be a strategical springboard for the function’s credibility. The risk for the profession is that these capabilities are absorbed elsewhere in the business and, in doing so, lose their laser focus on the organisation’s single greatest source of both opportunity and cost: its people. If workforce analytics becomes just another stream within enterprise data, it risks being reduced to a line item in a financial model rather than treated as the engine of long-term performance.

Without the technical capability to interrogate, model and optimise human potential, HR’s perspective can easily be drowned out by spreadsheets that prioritise short-term efficiency over sustained capability. And once that lens is lost, so too is the function’s strategic influence.

3.      The Expert

If you’ve worked in HR for as long as I have, you know that there is no definitive expectation of the HR Business Partner. They’re expected to be experts in all areas of the people spectrum, whilst being strategic, commercial as well as therapist, counsellor, coach and everything in between.

I’ve long been an advocate for being a generalist, having had a career that’s taken lots of twists and turns (from practicing law to leading technology), I believe that the future will require this model to die a death.

The problems that we’re going to be facing with our people are going to be more complex than ever. Research is showing that AI tools are having an impact on our ability think critically and they’re putting a larger than ever strain on our well-being. With the pace of change increasing and people feeling like they must work harder and harder to just stay level, how do we prevent burnout and get the most out of our people. How do we continue to drive innovation? LLMs feel like they provide you with the ‘sum average’ of everything that it consumes, but business tells us that being average is rarely good enough.

When I take a step-back and think about it though, isn’t this what HR should have been doing all along? Have we somehow missed the opportunity to tiller the ship, when it was right in front of our face all along?

The new role for people professionals will be to bring depth to a smaller number of increasingly difficult challenges, when previously they were relied on for absolute breadth.

The new HR operating System

What I increasingly see is a future People function built around a small, tight technology, automation and data core, surrounded by a deliberately lean pool of highly capable individual contributors. At the centre sits a compact team responsible for AI architecture, workflow automation, data science and governance, not a sprawling shared services machine, but a precision engine. Unlike in the past, this model is as relevant to SMEs’ as it is to large organisations. Get the tooling right and as an SME you can access fractional expertise as and when you need it. At scale you can afford to have embedded experts.

Think smaller, but sharper and more technical at its centre, with credible expertise at its edges. The traditional HRBP model was built for breadth, supported by centres of excellence, I’d argue that the model is dying a death and should be focused more on depth.  As a historic generalist, this is something that is terrifying, even to me.

So what next?

For us people professionals that have always been knee deep in the business, I don’t think it’s going to feel as different as we think it might be. I’m bewildered that there has been a 68% increase in HR roles since 2010. If we want to build credibility in the profession, it’s not about having more hands to the pump, but more about having paths into the profession that complement the challenges ahead. Data Scientists, technologists, psychologists, change managers. I talked about what AI can do for roles, but if you’re still reading (thank you), I think you want to know what this means. So, my predictions:

1.      Less operational roles

The usual trope that AI is going to remove manual tasks. But it really should. I’ve seen HR teams bogged down in admin and it removes any real value they can add by either interpreting people data or working with business leaders.

This does mean, that like elsewhere, entry-level positions will become more difficult to land. We’ll see what once a great opportunity for someone was to come in and learn replaced by chatbots, data models, workflows and real-time governance.

2.      Higher profile Individual Contributors

There will be a smaller number of HR professionals, but they’ll be expert coaches, ex-marketing gurus understanding the personas of prospective employees to develop killer EVPs, and project managers expertly navigating teams through change.

Underneath it all though, the key research from Amy Edmondson on the importance of psychological safety rings true more than ever. Research by MIT underlined the importance of this through the current period of change. The hill I will die on is that I believe all HR professionals that want to work with leaders need to be cognisant of the value of psychological safety and its impact on importance and change. Moreso now than ever before, because psychological safety for organisations is about being a performance enabler in a volatile environment.

What this will mean is that the market for genuinely good HR professionals in this space will heat-up, particularly for those that can make these things happen at scale. But it also means that others will be left behind, with the market becoming increasingly competitive for those that don’t sharpen their skills.

In his book ‘Deep Work’, Cal Newport talks of the roles that will add real value. I was struck by how few of these will sit in the people and HR space, but I also saw the opportunity for those individuals that can guide organisations at scale through this period are going to be incredibly valuable. In summary, my predictions are that:

-          Like everywhere else, AI exposes replaceable work. This means less entry, admin and people ops positions, but also creates an opportunity to develop technical depth.

-          If done well it’s a chance for the profession to become more respected not more dispensable.

-          To do this, it will need to be both leaner and sharper and frequently drawing on experts from outside the profession to bring in tangential experiences.

HR is uniquely placed to navigate what comes next. It understands human behaviour. It shapes culture. It manages change. It sits at the intersection of governance, ethics and organisational reality.

But it is not invulnerable. The profession has historically been weaker in data fluency and holds limited capital authority in many organisations. Whether HR is invited into the architectural conversation, or left to implement decisions made elsewhere, will depend entirely on its commercial credibility and technical confidence.

This moment represents both significant opportunity and genuine risk. Those who lean in, build capability and sharpen their expertise will become more influential than ever. Those who resist will find the new operating model less forgiving.