From CHRO to CWO: HR Leadership in the AI Era

Picture this scenario:

It is Monday morning and your organization is gearing up for a major product launch. You have had an AI agent scour the market over the weekend for competitors and potential customers. Another has translated that intelligence into a draft launch strategy. Algorithms are prioritizing leads while automated workflows have started routing information, assigning tasks, and triggering approvals. Around 9 a.m., your team is logging on and getting down to it: interrogating AI recommendations, refining freelancer and creative briefs, and coordinating the many moving parts, including political sensitivities, customer relationships, brand judgment, internal dynamics, and budgets.

It is a new way of working, with human beings and machines collaborating to get the job done more efficiently. But here is the thing: Who is responsible for all this work? Who has ultimate oversight over the people and the technology? If the AI belongs to your CIO and operations to your COO, where does that leave your HR function? And is there not a risk in this ever-evolving hybrid, human/machine workforce, that the lines of responsibility, ownership, and accountability might end up fragmented and confused?

Traditionally, the remit of HR has begun and ended with humans. The CHRO is ultimately responsible for managing people as a resource — leading their recruitment, training and development, overseeing their allocation and compensation, performance and progression. HR owns the processes and systems that determine how people are deployed, their talent distributed and shared. But in today's workplace, as sophisticated technologies reshape the work and the ways it gets done, HR also needs to evolve, or risk becoming sidelined by other functions. 

The challenge ahead of HR right now is one of reinvention.

Making that shift, from CHRO to CWO — from managing people to managing the architecture of work — will call for new ways of thinking and doing, and wholly new competencies. It will also mean leveraging and integrating AI technologies across traditional HR operations, processes, and systems in new and innovative ways.

And we are already seeing this in action in organizations today. The evolution has begun.

The challenge ahead of future CWOs is to determine what work needs to be done, and what combination of humans, AI, robots, and algorithms is optimal. And where better to start than within your own function?

What we are seeing in organizations today is the emergence of new practices: smart combinations of people and machines geared to minimizing the rote and routine, while making the most of human experience, expertise, intuition, and judgment. What all these practices share is a common understanding of the critical human role of specifying and verifying: the continuous need for people to identify the business need, articulate the nature and conditions attached to the problem, and then interrogate the results the machine generates by verifying and specifying again when necessary. And we are seeing this across a whole slew of HR processes.

Take AI in recruitment and screening. With the right specification, algorithms can eliminate the drudgery of whittling 10,000 resumes down to a shortlist of ten. It then falls to the human recruiters to meet with individual candidates and decide whose CV is passed on to the hiring manager. Machines can even be deployed in first-level interviews to overcome obstacles like time difference. Say you have a promising candidate on the other side of the planet. AI can be prompted to run a first-level interview, asking the same questions a human recruiter would ask, and analyzing responses, vocabulary, and other information to help the expert narrow the selection down. Here the technology is not only scaling the process but also helping organizations broaden the pool of potential talent, while leaving the final assessment and hiring decision to a human being. And that is not all. We are also seeing organizations deploy hybrid human/machine combinations to create more value in learning and development, coaching, and even well-being.

HR teams are using AI tools to create personalized career plans at scale. The AI is briefed to learn employees' career aspirations and, from there, pinpoint the experiences and scour the internet for the right programs and schools to fast-track their development, all in tandem with the learning and development function. The difference is they can now support thousands of employees and factor in a host of complex variables like calendars and budget. We are seeing organizations use technology to democratize access to coaching, which was once available only to senior executives.  At SHRM Labs, we have partnered with organizations such as Mento that are using AI to make coaching more accessible and scalable. Other organizations are connecting the human workforce to organizational resources and support at scale and more efficiently than traditional approaches by using technology to ensure employees are informed consumers of wellness and well-being benefits and financial planning.

Again, these and other practices share an important caveat. Smart HR functions do not simply unleash a range of AI tools on people and hope for the best. There is a critical and constant need for human judgment in the loop, specifying and verifying. The Chief Work Officer should understand this better than anyone: AI tools are designed to complement, not replace human judgment. But that is not the only imperative in front of an aspiring CWO.

There are three things the CWO of tomorrow will need to do to be successful: become AI fluent; stay at the frontier; and pilot carefully.

Become AI Fluent

To be very clear, AI literacy and AI fluency are not the same. Being familiar with concepts or terminology is one thing. Fluency, however, means understanding the fuller potential of AI and how it can be applied to HR and to work in practice. And for leaders, that implies a shift from consumer of AI tools to architect of their deployment. While this might sound like an impossible ask, most HR practitioners are grounded more in business administration and management than in IT. So, it is worth remembering the playing field is pretty level when it comes to AI. These are totally new technologies, which means HR leaders are not languishing decades behind tech colleagues. The opportunity is to learn with them and alongside them.

That means making it a priority to build enough technical understanding in order to interrogate the technology, to understand its capabilities and limitations. It means working with technologists and others to identify meaningful AI use cases, which are scenarios and trial workflows that remain within the limits of what AI can safely take over, and what it cannot. Above all, it means being very intentional about your learning. If you are able to speak to your organization about the practical applications of AI for HR and the broader workforce in concrete rather than hypothetical or theoretical terms, you are better placed to build the credibility that will see your organization put its trust in you and your authority as its Chief Work Officer.

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Stay at the Frontier

Building fluency is one thing. Staying fluent is another. And in a world where technology is evolving and reshaping work in real time, technical understanding can feel like a moving target to HR leaders who already feel overwhelmed by the pace of change. You simply do not have the time to monitor every new model, every new tool, platform, or use case. Staying abreast of what is possible, safe, and worth pursuing means leveraging the expertise of others.  

For aspiring CWOs, this is about finding reliable sources that can help you understand the landscape. Turn to associations and providers whose specialty is surveying the market and reporting back on the latest technologies, applications, and use cases. HR research and innovation platforms can provide a search-engine service to HR leaders, tracking and summarizing the findings of those specialist organizations that test what is new, what works, and what does not.  

Making good use of these services, tapping in for an update regularly — making it a weekly priority, for example — is a manageable way to benchmark and keep abreast of what is shifting, changing, and emerging in terms of opportunities and risks. It is a means of answering the question: What does evolving technology mean for how work gets done, and how might this apply to my own organization?

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Pilot With Care

Of course, the true test of managing a hybrid human/machine workforce lies in the application. And this is where timing and caution are critical for any CWO. The key is this: Never go all in. Go slow to go fast with these evolving workflows and workforces. The best place to begin is understanding your organization's appetite for risk. Remember, getting buy-in from the CEO and the C-suite is critical, but that does not automatically mean that your organization is fully ready to absorb new technologies, new tools, and new ways of getting things done. AI implementation is fundamentally a change-management exercise, so it falls to the CWO to be explicit, not only about the potential benefits, but also the potential trade-offs. Poorly managed experimentation can undermine trust and damage even the most successful careers. So go slow. Start with one or two pilots, track success, learn from the experience, and share the learning. And remember, as CWO you are an AI pioneer, not an evangelist. It is your role to test the water, not to dive right in.

There is a lot at stake with AI, and we are still very much in the early innings. The risks as much as the wins remain imperfectly understood, and the current economic conditions surrounding implementation may well change as providers shift to token or consumption models and away from free search models which are essentially geared to monetizing eyeballs. The costs of delivering all this computing power are significant, and someone will ultimately have to bear them, so the math may change. The question leaders should ask is whether the savings from eliminating human jobs will actually cover the full cost of the technology. You could end up spending more in the long run if the cost of the technology outweighs the savings from reducing human labor.

I do not believe AI is poised to replace the human side of work, or the human side of HR, anytime soon. People will always need to be responsible for specification and verification. AI can augment judgment, but it should never make consequential decisions alone. In the work we do — employee relations, the management and support of human beings — human judgment and interpersonal nuance are critical and should not be superseded by technology. That said, AI is absolutely poised to reshape the workforce as labor becomes more divided. Functions such as HR will contract as machines take over more of the rote work, even as they make space for new, more valuable jobs and responsibilities for the human beings that remain.

For the CWO, the question is not whether this change will happen. It is whether you are ready to lead it.

This article originally appeared on I by IBM and is reprinted with permission.