Will AI replace HR?

Layoffs have reached historic highs this year, and the AI arms race could be partly to blame.

There were 1,099,500 million job cuts between January and October, up 65% from the same period in 2024, a recent report from consulting firm Challenger, Grey, and Christmas found. And some of those layoffs affected HR departments. Amazon announced last month a 30,000-employee reduction-in-force (RIF) that has, and will continue to, affect HR pros. And Google earlier this year offered a buyout to employees in its people ops function.

People leaders, who largely lead employees through RIFs, may now find themselves on the chopping block, experts told HR Brew. However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

One step at a time. As technology advances faster than it has in decades, Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, told HR Brew that people leaders should remain flexible and open-minded, because the exact skills and jobs needed in the future of work are still largely unknown.

“It’s important to be humble as we’re thinking about what changes might come down the line. There are people out there who are throwing out, like, very grand predictions about AI and how much of [a] change it’s going to have,” Zhao said. “But the fact of the matter is, we don’t know exactly what those changes will look like.”

Many people previously thought prompt engineering was going to be “the job of the future,” Zhao added, but “that really hasn’t panned out at all.” HR pros, however, should be ready to reskill and upskill when the time comes.

“Even if AI is not necessarily causing significant disruption, yet, I do expect it to be a significant factor over the medium term where it’s going to change what skills are important, what jobs are more or less valuable,” he said. “That’s very hard to predict what that looks like, but it is likely to have a significant impact over the medium term.”

Even though AI has recently prompted organizations to reduce headcount, according to Zhao, it doesn’t necessarily mean the tech has already changed the way business is done—it’s more of an anticipatory measure.

HR leading the AI charge. As companies increasingly incorporate more AI tools into their workflows, people leaders will be tapped to lead a workforce transformation, said Cole Napper, VP of research, innovation, and talent insights at research firm Lightcast.

Next year, HR pros should focus on AI as part of their workforce strategies, Napper told HR Brew. HR has an opportunity to redefine how work gets done in their organizations by “separating the wheat from the chaff of AI that’s really making an impact,” he said.

“The world is changing very quickly, and businesses need good ideas to come from all parts of the organization,” Zhao said. “It’s not just something that leaders can enforce from the top down. It really needs to be something that employees across the organization are bought into.”