The signal from SHRM’s leadership is unusually direct. President and CEO Johnny Taylor declared that HR as a profession faces “extinction” and has “lost the plot” regarding the future of work. The warning is backed by troubling data: only 10% of the 92 Fortune 500 CEOs surveyed by SHRM in 2025 said they valued HR, and 30% felt the function delivered insufficient value to justify its existence.
The structural concern Taylor is identifying is not that HR is failing at its current tasks. It is that HR is still defining its tasks by a framework built before AI reshaped workforce composition. The profession’s traditional scope, performance appraisals, compliance, recruiting, and benefits administration, was built for human workforces. As companies increasingly deploy AI agents and automation alongside human employees, the organizational structures that manage those relationships belong somewhere. Taylor argues they should belong to a reconstituted “Chief Work Officer” function that manages humans, robots, and AI systems in an integrated workforce model.
The urgency is real. Companies including Bolt, Uber, and Meta have significantly reduced or eliminated HR teams in the past year, citing cost pressure and efficiency gains from automation. Approximately 1.6 million HR professionals in the United States face potential job displacement if the function does not expand its scope to match the actual composition of modern workforces. Globally, Taylor estimates 6.7 million HR practitioners face similar risk.
For HR technology leaders and platform vendors, Taylor’s call represents a market signal: the buyers of HR software are being asked to manage a fundamentally different workforce category than the one most HR platforms were built to serve. As examined in our analysis of the new CHRO mandate around AI confidence, the HR leader who can connect workforce investments to measurable business outcomes will survive this transition. The one who cannot will not.
Source: HR Dive
