How HR is adapting to an AI-driven future

Companies are pouring billions of dollars into AI investment, and such initiatives are starting to have ripple effects across the workforce.

Amazon and Nestlé are among the companies that recently laid off workers in part due to advancement in automation. Meanwhile, corporate leaders from companies like Ford, Shopify, and Salesforce are starting to be more explicit about the fact that some workers will lose their jobs due to AI.

Research suggests organizations can embrace AI without cutting workers, but doing so often requires attention to areas like upskilling, workflow redesign, and enhancing skills that can’t yet be replaced by the technology.

Given HR leaders are at the center of this workforce transformation, it’s not surprising that some companies are appointing chief people officers to oversee AI deployment internally. HR Brew reported on the rise of the “chief human and AI resources officer” in February, shortly after Moderna appointed its first chief people and digital technology officer.

ServiceNow’s chief people officer, Jacqui Canney, was promoted to a similar dual role in January. Canney and other HR leaders reflected on how the function is evolving for an AI-driven future at a recent HR Brew event in New York.

From knowing to leading. Canney observed that HR leaders have had to help embed different technologies into their organizations throughout her 30-year HR career—from on-premises software to cloud to mobile.

“In each one of those instances, what I’ve seen is where companies bring their people along, they get the value out of the technology that they bought much quicker…than some who don’t,” she said. The difference with generative and agentic AI, she noted, is that the technology is moving much faster.

Companies don’t have “years to accept the change from one to another. It’s down to months in many places to be able to create this agile workforce,” she said.

Because ServiceNow sells AI-driven products, “having a conversant, confident workforce that feels that way too” was top-of-mind for the company’s CEO, Bill McDermott, Canney said. To get employees fully up-to-speed with the technology, her team designed a four-stage learning journey that started with “knowing AI” and ended with “leading through AI.” She described the transformation, which took place largely over the last two years, as the “largest change management moment that I’ve ever seen in my career.”

HR as product manager. As HR leaders are overseeing the deployment of AI across their organizations, they’re also being challenged to think about the function from a product mindset, according to Canney and other leaders who attended the event.

HR teams are finding different ways to encourage employees to experiment with the technology, and even use it to make their jobs more enjoyable.

Workday, which promotes employee adoption through an initiative called “Everyday AI,” created a Slack channel where workers can share interesting use cases for the technology, said Allison Joyce, VP, global head of talent acquisition. Sarah Smart, a managing partner with HR consultancy HorizonHuman, said she’s had success emphasizing user experience when implementing AI. Showing a recruiter how they can use it to help filter applicants, or send 20 emails, for example, makes AI “a little less scary,” and creates “a lot more enthusiasm for adoption,” she said.

Over the last three years, IBM has asked employees to take part in WatsonX challenges, where they pitch new ways to improve their jobs with the company’s AI tools. The idea behind such initiatives is to get employees “to think about what is next. And if you get excited about what is next, then you’re not going to be afraid about staying in the past,” said Kim Morick, an HR technology offering leader with IBM Consulting.

Prioritizing transparency. HR leaders may be more integrated with technology than ever before, but getting employees to adopt AI might come down to a couple fundamentally human desires: transparency and trust.

“You really have to have clear and transparent communication. If you aren’t transparent about what the possible outcomes are, I think people then don’t trust,” said Diana Scott, US human capital center leader with The Conference Board. “I think that’s where leadership fails, very often. They’re not honest in their communication about where we’re going with these technologies and what might happen.”