From Digitizing HR to Redesigning Work.
This article is naturally addressed to those who make up the HR ecosystem: CHROs, HR Business Partners, Talent leaders, HRIS professionals, consultants, technology vendors, researchers and transformation leaders.
But it is just as much addressed to managers and business leaders.
Because what is changing is not only the HR function. It is the way all of us will work, decide, learn, manage and create value.
I entered Human Resources through what was probably the least HR-like door possible: technology.
I was an engineer. I worked with systems, interfaces, payroll rules and databases. My world was rational. A problem could be broken down, analysed and ultimately solved.
At the time, I probably believed that a better system could solve a large part of the problems HR was facing. If the processes were well designed, the data was clean and the technology worked properly, transformation would naturally follow.
It took moving to the other side of the table for me to understand how incomplete that view was.
A few years later, I was no longer working only on HR systems. I was recruiting people, developing talent, managing teams and eventually running an HR function.
I discovered trade-offs, resistance, human relationships, economic constraints and the difficult decisions that cannot be reduced to a workflow or an algorithm.
More importantly, I learned that a process can be technically perfect and still fail completely inside a real organisation.
That first lesson has stayed with me ever since.
We Have Already Transformed HR Many Times
Over the past twenty-five years, I have watched the HR function take on several different identities.
There was a time when HR was primarily about administration, payroll and compliance. Then came competency management, Talent Management, performance management and the HR Business Partner model. Later came employee experience, digitalisation, People Analytics, Cloud platforms, data and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
At every stage, we said the HR function needed to become more strategic. Closer to the business. More agile. More digital. More employee-centric.
And many genuine improvements followed.
But looking back, I now realise that most of these transformations had something in common.
We were mainly transforming how we managed work, much less the work itself.
We digitised recruitment.
We digitised learning.
Performance management.
Careers.
Compensation.
Mobility.
Yet underneath those processes, the fundamental model remained relatively stable.
A person occupied a job.
That job came with a set of responsibilities.
We defined the skills required to perform it.
We recruited someone.
We assessed that person’s performance.
And perhaps we prepared a successor.
A significant part of our HR architecture was built around this logic.
This Time, Something Is Different
Artificial intelligence is often presented as the next stage of HR digitalisation.
I believe we profoundly underestimate what is happening when we look at AI only through that lens.
AI is not simply automating another HR process.
It is beginning to participate directly in the production of work.
It writes. It analyses. It researches. It codes. It summarises. It prepares decisions. It produces content. It performs tasks that, until very recently, required hours of human work.
With AI agents, we are moving one step further.
Systems will no longer simply respond to a prompt. They will increasingly be able to sequence actions, interact with other systems, pursue an objective and execute parts of a process with growing levels of autonomy.
For the first time since I started working in HR, I do not believe the most important transformation is happening inside the HR function.
It is happening to the very thing HR exists to organise and support:
work itself.
And that changes almost everything.
We Built HR Around the Job
Consider something as ordinary as a job description.
It almost feels permanent.
A job corresponds to a set of responsibilities, tasks, skills and a certain level of seniority. A large part of the HR system then follows from it.
Recruitment searches for the person capable of filling the job.
Compensation determines its value.
Learning develops the skills required to perform it.
Performance management assesses the expected results.
Internal mobility proposes other jobs.
Workforce planning estimates how many jobs the organisation will need.
But what happens when that same job can be broken down into fifty tasks?
Fifteen might be automated.
Ten could be performed dramatically faster with AI.
Five might soon be delegated to autonomous agents.
And twenty might remain predominantly human.
What, then, becomes of the job?
More importantly, what happens to an HR function largely built around it?
I believe this may become one of the most important questions our profession will face over the coming years.
We talk a great deal about skills-based organisations. It is an important evolution.
But I believe the issue may go much further.
It is also one of the ideas I explore in my book The Death of Skills: the way we think about skills, jobs and career paths may become increasingly inadequate when AI is recomposing work faster than our traditional models can adapt.
We may gradually be moving from a world organised around jobs to a world organised around work.
The distinction may sound semantic.
It is anything but.
The Next HR Function Will Have to Architect Work
For years, we have told HR leaders that they need to understand the business better.
Tomorrow, that will not be enough.
The HR function will have to understand four dimensions simultaneously: people, business, technology and organisation.
Because the decisions ahead will no longer be purely HR decisions.
When an organisation decides that part of an activity can be performed by AI, the question will not simply be technological.
It will affect organisational design, responsibilities, skills, headcount, productivity, governance and sometimes the professional identity of the people involved.
When an AI agent can perform part of an employee’s work, someone will have to decide what we automate, what we augment and what we deliberately choose to keep human.
That decision should not belong only to IT.
Nor should it belong only to HR.
It will have to be made at the intersection of technology, business and people.
This may be where the next major evolution of our profession lies:
moving from managing Human Resources to architecting work.
Some Questions Are Going to Become Uncomfortable
If we accept this idea, many practices we currently take for granted will need to be questioned.
Can workforce planning continue to focus primarily on jobs and FTEs when productive capacity increasingly depends on people, tools, automation and AI agents?
How do we measure performance when two people with theoretically similar skills can produce radically different outcomes depending on their ability to work with AI?
How do we build tomorrow’s senior professionals when some of the tasks through which juniors traditionally learned their craft are being automated?
What does a critical skill mean when its economic value can change much faster than our competency frameworks?
How do we design careers when the jobs themselves become increasingly fluid?
And perhaps the most difficult question of all:
Who gets to decide what should still be done by a human?
We do not yet have all the answers.
I am increasingly cautious about those who claim that we do.
But one thing seems clearer to me every day: attempting to answer these questions using yesterday’s HR models will probably not work.
A Strange Return to Where I Started
When I look back at my own career, I find it almost ironic to see these worlds converging today.
I started with technology.
Then I moved into HR.
Later came transformation, consulting, entrepreneurship and business leadership.
For a long time, these experiences could have looked like different worlds.
Today, I increasingly see them as different sides of the same problem.
You cannot transform an organisation by understanding only people.
You cannot transform it by understanding only technology.
And you cannot decide the future of work without understanding how the organisation actually creates value.
The ability to make these worlds talk to one another will become increasingly important.
This May Be the Real Paradigm Shift
Over the past twenty-five years, I have been involved in very different HR transformations.
Systems were replaced.
Processes were redesigned.
Organisations were restructured.
New talent models were created.
HR became more digital and more professional.
But we are now approaching a transformation of a different nature.
The question is no longer simply how technology can improve Human Resources.
We now need to ask how humans, technology and organisations will work together.
And once that question becomes central, the mission of HR itself begins to change.
Our next challenge may therefore not be to build a more digital, more agile or even more intelligent HR function.
It will be to build a function capable of understanding how work is decomposed, how it is redistributed between humans and machines, how people will continue to learn and grow, and how we preserve what genuinely deserves to remain human.
For twenty-five years, I have worked on transforming Human Resources.
I am beginning to believe that the next twenty-five will be about something much deeper:
redesigning work itself, and then having the courage to redesign HR around that new reality.