For hundreds of years, society has tried to figure out the best ways for people and machines to work together. As agentic AI capabilities accelerate, organizations need to learn how people and machines can think together as well. The widespread use of powerful AI has enormous implications for organizations. Agentic AI will change not only how people work but also the nature of work itself, creating new employee roles. Chief human resources officers (CHROs) who can help lead their companies through this transition will rise in status within their organizations. Those who cannot may become less relevant.

It’s a golden opportunity—not least because human resources leaders are people experts. “HR is best positioned to design the future blended human-machine workforce,” says Greg Vert, human capital applied AI leader at Deloitte Consulting. “This is an opportunity for human resources to reinvent itself, to reimagine itself, to lead the enterprise and the workforce through the single biggest work redesign since the Industrial Revolution.”

CHROs are already feeling pressure to do more to take advantage of AI. “CHROs are being asked: ‘What’s your AI roadmap?’” says Dan Beck, president and chief product officer of SAP SuccessFactors. HR leaders are expected to know not only how AI affects the HR function, but “the entire employee base of the company,” he adds.

After all, HR recruits and hires the right people for the right jobs. It makes sure the company retains those people by fostering a positive and safe work environment with good benefits and the appropriate level of compensation. It is responsible for protecting the company from regulatory and legal risk related to labor. And HR leaders serve as management advocates for employee needs.

The disruptive potential of AI has captured the C-suite’s attention. Retraining to keep up with the demands of customers, evolving business models, and transformative technology is the C-suite’s top concern in 2025, according to Mercer’s 2025 Executive Outlook. If CHROs can show they understand how to combine human work and AI capability to improve organizational performance, they could become strategic architects of the new world of work: redesigning jobs, retraining people, and advising on what limits should be in place to protect employees and morale.

Time to get to work

If the opportunity is clear, so is the challenge: CHROs have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to AI. HR has not kept pace with tech innovation. Mercer’s survey, Global Talent Trends 2024–2025, found that “only 15% of organizations were using AI to automate tasks within the HR function.” Implementing or upgrading HR technologies ranked among the top challenges in the HR operating model, according to the survey.

While most CHROs and employees may have used generative AI to answer queries or create content, it’s a huge leap from such limited exposure to transforming the entire workforce with agentic AI. Agentic AI moves AI from suggestion to execution. It moves from automating tasks at human behest with generative AI (GenAI) to augmenting human thinking. Agentic AI can make decisions and carry out entire workflows, independent of human input. AI agents can even work together, making judgments and triggering actions within the HR department and across different business functions. Experts caution that companies taking advantage of agentic AI should insert people to oversee it.

Already behind the technology curve and with AI innovation accelerating, “the HR profession needs to embrace rapidly evolving AI capabilities over the next 12 to 18 months to create the bandwidth, insights, and agility to support the next wave of business and workforce transformation,” Vert says.

To lead this revolution in work, Vert says, CHROs need to demonstrate that HR has both the capability (such as the understanding of how AI and humans can work together to improve business outcomes) and the capacity (such as enough focus and scalability to support the entire company.) Only when CHROs develop HR’s AI muscle will the C-suite consider them capable of transforming the rest of the workforce with AI, Vert explains.

The risk of not pursuing this path is losing out on the chance to lead the company’s direction as AI plays a bigger role.

The role of talent management on assessing where agentic AI and people work

CHROs can help their companies combine the best capabilities of humans and AI. This entails breaking current job roles down into tasks to be performed, decisions to be made, and judgments to be rendered, and determining what to entrust to the AI.

“CHROs have to look at their job as owning the workforce end to end,” says Anthony Abbatiello, workforce transformation leader, principal, PwC US. That means playing a lead role in “agentifying” a function—figuring out how to combine human talent and imagination with agentic capabilities. Then they’ll need to “manage that workforce with both humans and AI agents—each with different skills,” he says.

But this could largely depend on whether CHROs have the technical chops. Biotech company Moderna recently placed its IT department under its CHRO. The move was prompted by CEO Stéphane Bancel’s observation of “the increasing entanglement of AI in workplace functions,” as Ken Knapton of IDC noted on CIO.com. A key part of the decision was the happy fact that Moderna’s current CHRO, Tracey Franklin, has IT as well as HR expertise.

As they take on technology leadership, HR leaders can represent the interests of employees. “They are responsible for setting the guardrails for their company,” says Shrikant Pattathil, president and CTO of Harbinger Group, a global technology company. “Management will expect the CHRO to step up and say what’s good from the employee standpoint. What’s OK to do and what’s not OK. It will be important to set those guardrails correctly.”

These are early days in the use of AI agents in business processes. But even now, experts see four ways HR leaders can ease the transition to incorporating them.

4 ways HR leaders can transition to using AI agents

1. Face employee angst head on.

HR leaders can alleviate workforce alienation by providing honest assessments and information on how AI will affect people in their jobs.

While specific training on how to use AI will be needed, the most important aspect of a CHRO’s leadership will be setting realistic expectations about jobs. Even as senior leaders are gauging how AI will affect their workforce, “the next level down, when they hear ‘agentic AI,’ they think they’re going to get automated out of their job,” says Beck.

Employee roles will change, sometimes dramatically, as the organization implements agentic AI. And certain jobs will no doubt disappear. For example, instructional designer may disappear as a job in HR, because AI will be able to do most of that type of work, says Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, which consults on HR issues. But he also points out that many new roles will be created. CHROs can emphasize the new opportunities for workers while acknowledging the potential for job loss.

2. Work with IT to ensure employee data security.

HR systems are a treasure trove of personally identifiable information. As AI agents perform more work and access more databases across the enterprise, the risk of exposing people’s data goes up. Without proper safeguards, as noted by Vinay Roy, a data science expert at Vista Global and teacher at Berkeley Haas School of Business, an AI agent might expose sensitive personally identifiable information, for example.

3. Guard against bias in agentic AI implementations.

HR leaders can ensure that the company watches for information bias or an absence of certain types of data that could lead to inaccurate or damaging outcomes. It’s well known that algorithms can have built-in biases that could affect hiring practices in illegal or unacceptable ways. A variety of organizations are working on anti-bias tools to guard against this danger. But the other type of bias, which could result from a lack of context or data, emerges with agentic AI and warrants attention. Because it was born of technologists, agentic AI can likely write an accurate posting for a software engineer, Bersin notes. But what about an opening for a job that technologists know little about, such as a manager at a retail furniture store?

4. Advocate for the importance of the human element in the company’s work.

CHROs can serve as the arbiter of good judgment, recognizing the importance of human qualities and determining when to reserve certain decisions and evaluations for humans alone.

Many aspects of jobs will still require a person’s judgment and empathy, says Dr. Steven Hunt, a former SAP executive and author of Talent Tectonics: Navigating Global Workforce Shifts, Building Resilient Organizations, and Reimagining the Employee Experience.

An AI agent booking travel might reserve a particular hotel because it’s less expensive, but it might be in an unsafe part of town, Hunt points out. Human input and oversight will be critical, not only because AI lacks empathy and common sense, but it also can still make mistakes and create hallucinations. If a generative AI system gets something wrong, a person can catch and correct it, says Bersin. With agentic AI, “if it hires the wrong person or gives somebody the wrong performance appraisal, you’ve got a problem.”

These risks explain why most experts recommend keeping a person in the loop. “Our strategy is to keep a human in the middle,” says Beck. “The agent is going to intuit what you want, deliver that, but then ask if it gave you what you need.”

Champion of the human, friend of the “superworker”

CHROs can become the champions of the human being, ensuring that people can do higher-level, more interesting work with systems that use agentic AI.

Consider the HR department. About half of HR capacity today is spent on process execution and service delivery, according to Vert. As AI agents carry out more processes and perform more services—such as answering complex benefits questions and sourcing candidates—people can complete more interesting and complex tasks.

With the right training and culture, they can become what Bersin calls “superworkers,” spending that time improving the service or product, generating new ideas, and adding value. For example, one of Bersin’s clients has an AI system that interviews stakeholders, imports documentation, builds training programs, and publishes training and certification programs. The employees who oversee that process, who fine-tune and perfect the final product, are the superworkers.

The superworker example speaks to the idea that effective agentic AI implementations free up work time. That extra time means employees can focus on the work that only they can do. Beck quotes Gina Vargiu-Breuer, SAP’s chief people officer: “We put the human back in human resources.”

For example, senior employees often have HR business partners, so they can get personal HR advice when needed. “There are a lot of things you want to talk to a human about, something that is sensitive or personal, for example,” says Beck. As HR staff gains more time, “maybe we all get a named HR business partner.” For his part, Vert similarly thinks recruiters can spend more time talking to potential candidates rather than being bogged down by administrative tasks.

The changes wrought by agentic AI will require CHROs to deftly manage evolving job and skill requirements. In general, certain employee skills—such as knowing how to use certain software—may become less important, while the so-called soft skills become extremely important. Companies will need to hire for the human qualities that AI does not have, says Hunt: creativity, empathy, and emotional intelligence. When things go wrong, an upset employee or customer needs “emotional intelligence, not technical intelligence.”

As job and skill requirements change, compensation levels will need to be re-evaluated. “Our society has historically undervalued social skills compared to technical skills,” Hunt says, pointing out that the medical technology manufacturing employee who builds your grandmother’s home hospital bed likely earns a lot more than the home healthcare aide who visits her every day to attend to her physical and emotional needs. “How do we more effectively measure the contributions of people in frontline service roles?” he asks. “How do we recognize the ones that are really good at helping other people? This is going to be a challenge because that requires a massive societal change.”

Then there is the whole question of measuring and rewarding performance. The more people team up with AI agents, and eventually manage teams of agents, the bigger that question will loom. When the work is accomplished by a combination of human and AI, “How do I reward and incentivize the human in the loop?” asks PwC’s Abbatiello. “How much of that final performance or work product came from the work of the employee and how much came from the AI agent?” To help manage human-AI teams, Abbatiello suggests companies create a performance management process to help measure performance metrics and create new incentive plans for jobs involving AI agents.

CHROs and their teams will be vital figures in answering these questions.

Agentic AI applied to the CHRO’s function

In addition to supercharging employees, CHROs can boost their own performance with AI agents, using them to spot business insights and trends. Agents might be able to find and analyze all sorts of data to identify problems or suggest ways to improve the organization’s operations.

For example, an agent might call attention to areas of high attrition or where the company seems to spend too much on labor. It might correlate data to reveal patterns about recruitment, hiring, and departures. Maybe employees recruited from this particular region or university—or who are hired with this particular set of skills—routinely underperform in a particular job. “That could prompt CHROs to say, ‘maybe we need to change the way we recruit or maybe change the way the job is designed’,” says Bersin. “Now you’re getting into more strategic conversations about human resources.”

“We are tantalizingly close to this capability,” says Beck. “Enterprise systems generate all this data. With the ability to just ask a question of the data through your AI agent, senior leaders can run a better enterprise.”

The potential is there, but CHROs must move now to understand the technology and its implications, earn credibility with the C-suite, and capitalize on the opportunity to design a brave new world of work.

Read more