SHRM's President and CEO: HR’s Role in an Uncertain AI Future

If the headlines about artificial intelligence feel louder and more alarming than they did a few months ago, you're not imagining it.

Some of the strongest warnings are now coming from the people building these technologies. Questions about the pace of AI development, the future of work, and the risks of increasingly capable systems deserve serious attention.

But there's another conversation that matters just as much, and it's happening inside your organization: What does all this mean for the people who are actually doing the work?

That's where HR has a critical role to play. 

You don't need to have an answer today about where AI will be five or ten years from now. You do need to understand how AI is changing work today, where it can create value, where it introduces risk, and what your workforce needs from you as those changes accelerate.

At SHRM, we believe the goal is not AI for AI's sake. It's AI plus Human Ingenuity (HI) equals ROI: combining artificial intelligence with human intelligence to produce better outcomes for organizations and their people. For HR, that starts with a few practical priorities.

Focus on the Work

The most useful question is not "What can this technology do?" It's "What should we be doing differently because this technology exists?" HR leaders must help organizations identify where AI can augment people, where human judgment remains essential, and where work itself needs to be redesigned. 

Seminar: Building an AI-Enabled Workfore

Keep People at the Center

Employees will have legitimate questions about how AI will affect their jobs, their skills, and their opportunities — including, for some, real concern about whether their role will still exist in its current form. Those concerns deserve a direct answer, not just reassurance. Give them facts where you have them. Be candid about what you don't know. And create opportunities for people to build AI fluency through meaningful work, not just training modules. AI adoption cannot be separated from workforce development.

Research: Automation, AI, and Job Displacement Risk in U.S. Employment 

Don’t Overlook Your People Managers

Technology does not transform an organization by itself. People managers are often the people who translate new technology into the day-to-day work of their teams. They decide whether time saved by automation gets reinvested in coaching, quality, and development — or simply absorbed into higher output expectations with nothing given back. They determine how employees learn new ways of working and where human judgment adds the most value. If we want AI to make organizations better, we need people managers who know how to lead alongside it.

Caution Doesn't Mean Standing Still

HR has a responsibility to ask hard questions about privacy, security, bias, job design, skills, and responsible use. But caution should help us make better decisions, not prevent us from making decisions at all. The technology will continue to develop. Our responsibility is to help our organizations develop with it. 

The AI conversation will continue to evolve. There will be breakthroughs, setbacks, disagreements, and no shortage of predictions about what comes next.

HR does not need to predict the future. We need to prepare people for it.

That means helping organizations make smart decisions about where AI belongs, helping employees build the capabilities they will need, helping people managers lead through change, and making sure the human side of work doesn't get lost in the excitement around the technology.

That's the work SHRM is here to support. We're continuing to build practical resources to help HR professionals move from uncertainty to action, including our AI at Work webinar series and other guidance on AI adoption, workforce strategy, and the changing nature of work. 

There's a lot we don't know about where AI ultimately takes us. But we know where HR needs to be: leading the workforce through the change.