HR Leaders Must Build Future-Ready HR Teams For the AI Age

As AI transforms work, HR leaders have the opportunity to play a more strategic, organization-impacting role – both elevating the impact of AI on the organization and growing their own influence as a function.

However, neither HR’s staff nor HR’s operating model is fully ready to meet these new demands – HR’s roles and skills are often locked into HR’s transactional past.

We spoke with Piers Hudson, Senior Research Director in the Gartner HR practice, about how HR must align its teams and roles to HR’s core differentiating capabilities - and thereby elevate both AI’s and the workforce’s impact on business outcomes.

Journalists who would like to speak with Piers regarding this topic can contact mary.baker@gartner.com or gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. Members of the media can reference this material in articles with proper attribution to Gartner. 

A: AI is automating many HR activities and Gartner predicts that by 2030, 60% of HR work tasks will be completed through an intelligent agent or LLM-centric interface.

HR must anticipate where support demands will rise and assess how much their staff must adapt. This means both responding to emerging needs and upskilling HR talent simultaneously.

Unfortunately, many operational leaders do not involve HR in AI projects because they don’t see the need or fear HR will slow them down. It’s imperative that HR clarifies its role in an AI-infused workplace and builds an operating model with the right capabilities for this role. Otherwise, HR risks becoming a smaller function monitoring processes for compliance, rather than being a key amplifier of AI’s benefits.

A: Overall, HR will need deeper and more specialized expertise in people-management-related tasks, or the needs of specific types of workers as AI automates processes – expertise it does not have today. To support this, HR will need a range of new roles to gather up knowledge that is more distributed and dynamic, including:

• Embedded Chief of Staff Roles: This role manages the people aspects of tech rollouts to achieve performance improvements. It will nurture “citizen HR” capabilities within operational teams for effective use of HR services.
• Global Business Services “Productization” Leads: As AI automates work across functions there will be demand for integrated systems that manage these processes together. HR will see staff move into roles in centralized AI enablement teams but also have productization leads to pass HR processes to these teams.
• Community Managers: HR will bring together communities of expertise via community managers to facilitate collaboration, share best practices, and capture valuable insights from these groups.
• Work or Worker-Type Specialists: HR will gather expertise either in types of specific work (i.e. programming, customer service) or key types of workers – potentially understanding the full lifecycle from hire-to-retire and acting as their talent agents to ensure a good supply of workers for the organization.
• HR “Labs”: This role will bring a behavioral science approach to newly arising issues via simulation and scenario-based analyses. HR lab teams will continually find, manage and engineer new sources of data to feed into these simulations.
• Consensus Facilitators: These expert mediators create frameworks for reward and well-being that align to organizational strategy. They identify influential managers and employees, build trust and shape their views toward shared positions.
• Product Managers: These roles promote a product mindset across HR with greater emphasis on the internal customer experience, fewer silos between HR products or services, and sunsetting services that no longer provide value.

A: Freed from transactional activities, HR can take on a more strategic role within their organization, especially as AI creates new needs for HR’s support. There are certain areas where HR is uniquely placed to support this strategic work – areas like organizational and role redesign or long-term skills planning and talent pipeline development are all critical to drive AI-infused work benefits. These areas also highlight HR’s ability to identify both the “art of the possible” and the cross-functional impacts of workforce decisions. 

A: To build a new HR operating model and a more influential HR function, Gartner recommends that CHROs:

1. Assess the progress and potential of HR technologies to automate or democratize HR tasks. Identify where this frees up potential for current HR staff to play new roles and the level of change this would require.
2. Dedicate a share of HR’s budget and time to innovative applications of AI technology, with a focus on the new types of work these could allow.
3. Identify and pilot product management roles in areas needing end-user behavior change or adoption and where solutions are fragmented.
4. Identify areas of the business where there are already signs of “citizen HR” — particularly related to technology projects. Gather these groups into communities of expertise and share good practices with one another.
5. Develop new metrics to measure HR’s impact, such as tracking the number of HR staff moving into the business.

Gartner clients can read more in the report: HR in 2030: Plan Now for HR’s Future Roles.