AI is reordering what HR leaders are responsible for, and new Gartner research puts a specific frame on the shift: CHROs are being asked to lead the redesign of work itself, not just the workforce that performs it.
Blakeley Hartfelder, senior director analyst at Gartner’s HR practice, outlines four ways the CHRO mandate is expanding. First, building flexible talent supply: treating skills programs, mobility platforms, and external pipelines as adjustable products that adapt to changing business needs rather than slow, linear hiring processes. Second, establishing governance for human-versus-machine work allocation: helping leaders make intentional, transparent decisions about which tasks AI performs and which humans retain. Third, co-leading enterprise-wide workflow redesign: Gartner finds that business units which redesign work alongside AI deployment rather than layering AI on top of existing workflows are twice as likely to exceed revenue goals. Fourth, using AI to optimize HR itself: reducing administrative burden and personalizing services at scale.
The data behind the urgency is clear. A 2025 Gartner survey of 110 CHROs found that 50 percent aim to use AI to restructure how work is organized by 2026. A November 2024 survey of 456 CEOs found that 56 percent plan to de-layer most middle management roles using AI within five years. These are commitments already on the boardroom agenda that HR leaders have to navigate without owning the decision.
The original insight: this reframing relocates where human labor decisions are made. Work design has historically been an operations, finance, or IT responsibility. Gartner’s argument, supported by the CEO data, is that those decisions are now people decisions with workforce consequences that HR must help shape. That is a meaningful expansion of accountability, and it arrives alongside the organizational politics of displacing functions that have historically owned the workflow. The CHRO who positions HR as a work-design partner rather than a headcount manager is doing something structurally different from prior CHRO generations. Platform vendors like Workday are already building toward this model on the technology side.
Source: HR Executive
