There is a huge public concern that AI is going to shrink the workforce and that the technology is coming for jobs. These concerns hit close to home for HR executives, who are responsible for guiding the workforce through AI-driven changes while also confronting questions about how the technology will change their own teams and functions.
Amid this reality, the data available so far tells a more nuanced—and encouraging—story. A recent Ramp and Revelio report found that the companies that are adopting AI most aggressively are also growing their headcounts the fastest, while lower-adoption peers are flat. Specifically, these high-AI-adoption companies grew headcount by about 10% over the two years following adoption. Additionally, entry-level hiring at those companies grew even faster at around 12%.
When implemented well, AI adoption can make companies more efficient, and increased efficiency creates a knock-on effect: company ambition rises; output expectations go up; and more tasks and execution are required.
As such, the coordination required to hold all of this together across teams and systems (including software that now acts on its own) only becomes more important. This coordination work is HR’s to design, so the CHRO’s role in the AI era only becomes more important.
See also: Meet your AI agent: The new ‘chief of staff’ for HR professionals?
Four areas for CHROs to claim
More research from IBM validates this trend: the company’s 2026 CEO Study found that 59% of CEOs expect the CHRO’s influence to expand over the next three years—specifically because of AI.
Influence will follow ownership of the work. As more companies turn to AI-driven decision-making, ownership of this coordination falls into four areas that today’s CHRO must claim:
1. Workforce Architecture
Organizations are preparing themselves for a workforce that is part human and part digital, with AI agents executing tasks alongside human employees. One instinct has been to treat those agents as features inside the tools that HR already uses, but that’s a mistake.
A digital worker or agent needs similar structures and guidelines to those provided to a human employee on their first day on the job. They need a defined role, an owner/manager, and access that is scoped to the functions of their job. Designing that structure and workforce architecture should belong to HR. HR should define who does what, along with how the two halves of this new workforce architecture fit into a single operating model.
2. Agent vs. Human Decision Rights
Now that agents can act across an organization, someone will have to decide, deliberately, which choices or actions agents are allowed to make and which require human oversight and control. A good rule of thumb for today’s digital workforce is to give agents the routing and coordination work but keep the judgment calls with the people whose expertise should be relied upon over autonomous decisions.
Consider an organization that may take in thousands of job applications every year. An agent can pre-qualify applicants against the desired skills, but the ultimate decision-making around hiring is, of course, a human call. CHROs need to define these lines on purpose rather than let them get drawn elsewhere or by default.
3. Governance and Escalation Design
Governance and escalation are probably the most critical areas to own, yet they’re the ones that many companies get backward today. Effective governance can’t be bolted on after systems are already running, one monitoring dashboard or policy document at a time. It must be incorporated directly into a company’s workflows and processes that determine how AI agents operate, make decisions and escalate issues.
For example, policy checks should exist before an agent makes any consequential decisions. A second set of eyes should always be pulled in when policy requires it, and clear paths should exist for escalating exceptions to a person. Yet Gartner reports that only 13% of organizations believe they have the right governance in place for AI agents.
This indicates a real problem, as Gartner also projects that the average global Fortune 500 enterprise will be running more than 150,000 agents by 2028. If this prediction materializes, HR must close this governance gap and own the policies at the center of workforce orchestration between humans and agents.
4. Partnership With the CIO
To make this orchestration seamless, CHROs must create strong partnerships with their CIOs. While HR designs how the work should move and where human judgement applies, CIOs will be responsible for building and securing the orchestration layer that carries work across existing systems. Neither business function can deliver a governed, hybrid workforce on its own.
CHROs must co-own the workflows with their CIOs and agree on how they will be enforced and measured together. The responsibility can’t be left with IT to sort out. Like the tide, strong partnerships between CHROs and CIOs will lift both functions and the broader organization to realize AI’s potential.
Start with one process
What might seem daunting at first doesn’t require a multi-year transformation to begin. The most useful first step is to identify one process that already crosses multiple departments and establish a governed version of it. The employee onboarding process is one example, since it touches HR, IT, payroll, facilities and the hiring team.
Starting small accomplishes three things at once: It shows you where your coordination currently lacks; it gives you a measurable before-and-after framing; and it produces a documented record of how a real process operated in coordination with AI, including what systems it touched and precisely where humans were involved.
The auditable track record is crucial in demonstrating how work was orchestrated and completed. And once a CHRO establishes success with one process, they can rely on that proof point to replicate the approach across other areas of the business. By taking this approach, CHROs can move beyond simply managing workforce change and instead have a direct hand in transforming how the business operates with both human and digital workers.
The post The AI era for business is here. Here’s what CHROs must own appeared first on HR Executive.
This article was originally published on HR Executive. Click below to read the complete article.