The signal from SHRM’s leadership is unusually direct. President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. told the SHRM26 conference in Orlando in June that HR as a function faces “extinction” and must evolve in the face of AI, according to Virginia Business. Taylor cited his conversations with Fortune 500 CEOs: roughly 30% of those he has spoken with reported seeing little value in HR, SHRM’s own account of the keynote reports.
The structural concern Taylor is identifying 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. “With so much pressure to build and implement AI, there’s less money to spend on people,” Taylor said. He argues that HR leaders should serve as their organization’s “Chief Work Officer”, stewards of all things work who help employers navigate rapid technological and workforce transformation. “We’ve got to become experts on work itself,” he said.
The urgency is real. Taylor pointed to Uber’s decision to reduce its HR function significantly, according to a recap of the keynote by Alexia Georghiou, which also quotes his warning: “The livelihoods of everyone in this room and the 1.6 million people in this country and the 6.7 million people globally practicing HR are in danger.”
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: SHRM
