A 2025 Gartner survey of 110 CHROs found that approximately 50% aim to use AI to reimagine their operations by 2026. As AI automates many traditional administrative tasks, HR departments must find new ways to create strategic value. Increasingly, that value comes from the design and evolution of work itself, not just the management of employees.
What is changing now is not just the speed of work, but the decision-making around work itself. HR leaders no longer just decide how many people to hire and where to place them. They are deciding which results require human judgment, which can be standardized, and which should be fully delegated to AI. They are redesigning entire roles and workflows and even inventing new types of work.
These choices impact skills needs, career paths, employee benefits, talent pipelines, and employees’ professional and personal identities. Organizations need HR to not only continue to strengthen its traditional role in supplying and supporting talent, but also to help decide what jobs people should do.
See also: A new productivity paradigm: Embracing AI for sustainable growth
HR is well-positioned to deliver this new kind of value because it has an enterprise-wide view of equity and expertise around roles and ways of working, change and the human element of transformation. However, this will require a true transformation of the function and its value proposition, not just the efficiency and service delivery improvements facilitated by recent HR transformations.
By focusing on the design and evolution of work, HR departments can directly impact two of the most important differentiators in the AI era: the workforce and how work gets done. To achieve this, CHROs must redefine the HR role in four key ways.
Build a flexible talent supply
Human resources departments provide value by ensuring that organizations have the people they need to perform the jobs they define. What changes is how that value is delivered. HR departments must regularly adjust their talent supply in response to changes in the competitive environment, finding and training talent faster and redeploying talent faster.
Rather than relying on time-consuming, linear talent processes, HR departments need to manage “talent products” that can be combined and adapted to meet changing needs. These may include reskilling programs, internal mobility platforms, and external talent pipelines.
CHROs can help make the necessary changes by helping teams think in value streams. They need to identify the critical HR outcomes currently required and map the associated value streams, i.e. the end-to-end activities that drive the outcomes and the associated HR roles.
Guide human and machine task decisions
As AI becomes incorporated into workflows, organizations must decide how to divide work between humans and machines. These decisions are complex and consequential. AI is creating more trade-offs and risks around how work is distributed and even which work is most important. While there are currently no best practices for positioning human and technology talent, these decisions will increasingly shape career paths, employee trust, skill needs, and ultimately an organization’s long-term competitiveness in the marketplace.
HR needs to step into the governance role and help leaders make sense of these decisions. CHROs must guide and manage decisions about human and machine work, with responsibility for ensuring decisions are intentional, transparent, and aligned with long-term employee and business priorities. This accountability gives CHROs a position to influence the development of work at the highest levels of the organization. CHROs can start by encouraging discussion on central AI steering committees or in conversations with business leaders about the impact of AI investments on talent and, ultimately, other parts of the organization’s operating model.
Co-lead work redesign
AI often falls short when layered on top of existing roles and workflows. Employees face friction when trying to use new tools with old workflows or are unable to take full advantage of the time freed up by AI. This challenge will continue to grow as human work becomes more focused on creative and critical thinking. New design and governance will be needed to create a culture that is safe to fail, ensure employee health, and build the diverse connections needed for this type of work to thrive.
Based on an analysis of a July 2025 Gartner survey of 1,973 managers, business units that redesigned how work gets done, rather than simply implementing AI and encouraging employees to use it, are twice as likely to exceed revenue targets. Human resources departments will need to co-lead work transformation at the enterprise level, building on growing expertise in organizational design, change management, and human-machine interaction.
CHROs can take the first step by co-leading a workflow diagnostic with management and asking HRBP to perform a similar diagnostic within the business unit. The goal of workflow diagnostics is to identify handoff bottlenecks, pain points, and gaps in the workflow that have been exacerbated or could be improved by AI. By focusing on critical workflows where AI is already being applied or where it can be most effective, HR will not only support AI transformation, but also drive it.
Optimize employee support with AI
As HR departments embrace AI, especially AI agents, HR services will increasingly be delivered through platforms that streamline and remove low-value administrative tasks from employee and manager workloads. The platform also enhances the personalization of HR services and facilitates activities that drive improved performance for managers, employees, and leaders.
In a November 2024 survey of 456 CEOs, 56% said they would use AI to layer most middle management roles within the next five years. In this context, optimized service delivery becomes even more important in order for managers to spend time on providing appropriate support to employees they do not meet or interact with frequently.
CHROs can begin delivering optimized employee support by evaluating AI technologies that enhance HR self-service, testing top-priority use cases in focused pilots, and building service offerings that can be executed with limited human involvement without deviating from the intended employee experience. When new technology aligns with actual employee needs and business goals, it becomes much easier to maintain adoption. With business partners investing in its implementation, CHROs can redefine the value of HR by eliminating obsolete tasks and focus their time and attention on things that directly impact performance.
