The Future of Human Resources: Organizational Engineering
A cyborg has organic parts, a robot is mechanical, and an android is a special type of robot that's made to look/act human.
As artificial intelligence evolves from simple automation to autonomous decision-making, Human Resources faces an identity crisis that demands more than cosmetic changes. The question isn't just whether HR will transform—it's what form that transformation will take. Will HR become a cyborg function, blending human intuition with AI capabilities? Will it merge with IT like Moderna's bold experiment? Or will it evolve into something entirely unprecedented?
The Current State: HR's Identity Crisis
HR, like other functional areas in our companies, is going to have a real-life identity crisis. If you can't figure out how to move your HR function up the maturity level quickly, someone's just going to cut your headcount. This stark warning from Josh Bersin reflects a harsh reality: HR teams spend up to 57% of their time on repetitive tasks, work that AI can increasingly handle.
Yet the pressure isn't just about efficiency. Global executives see AI as the top business priority and the biggest potential value driver in 2025, while 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments in the next three years. The writing is on the wall: adapt or become obsolete.
Path One: The Cyborg Model - Human-AI Symbiosis
The cyborg model represents the most intuitive evolution: HR functions that seamlessly blend human judgment with AI capabilities. This isn't about replacing humans with machines, but creating hybrid intelligence that amplifies human potential.
What this looks like in practice:
Augmented Decision-Making: HR professionals using AI to analyze vast datasets while applying human empathy and contextual judgment to final decisions
Predictive Partnership: Predictive AI can anticipate employee turnover with 87% accuracy, but humans interpret the why and craft retention strategies
Personalized at Scale: AI handles the complexity of personalizing experiences for thousands of employees while HR professionals design the frameworks and handle exceptions
The cyborg model preserves HR's human essence while dramatically expanding its capabilities. It acknowledges that agentic AI can analyze complex data, make independent decisions, and take proactive actions, but positions humans as the strategic orchestrators.
Path Two: The Android Model - IT-HR Convergence
Moderna's merger of its tech and HR departments under Chief People and Digital Technology Officer Tracey Franklin represents something more radical: the android model. More than a digital transformation project, it is a complete overhaul of the way a business conceives its roles, tools, workflows, and operating model.
Why this convergence makes sense:
Shared Infrastructure: Both functions increasingly rely on the same underlying technologies and data architectures
Workflow Integration: The company has developed over 3,000 tailored versions of ChatGPT, called GPTs, that are designed to facilitate specific tasks spanning both technical and human challenges
Skills Convergence: Modern HR requires deep technical literacy while IT increasingly needs to understand human psychology and organizational behavior
Franklin's approach at Moderna is telling: "It's like your virtual HR, AI agent. It's what would normally be a junior-level HR analyst type, we've now converted into a GPT." This isn't just automation—it's reimagining the fundamental nature of HR work.
The android model creates functions that look like traditional HR but operate with mechanical precision and scalability. One large pharmaceutical company manages a team of 6,000+ scientists and manufacturing experts with only ten people in learning and development by automating training, compliance tracking, and operational support.
Path Three: The Metamorphosis Model - Complete Reinvention
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that HR evolves into something entirely new—neither traditional HR nor a simple merger with IT, but a fundamentally different organizational function.
What this might look like:
Chief Experience Officer (CXO): Moving beyond "People" or "Human Resources" to encompass the total experience ecosystem—employee, customer, and stakeholder experiences as interconnected systems.
Organizational Intelligence Director: A role focused on building and maintaining the organization's collective intelligence—human, artificial, and hybrid—rather than just managing human capital.
Work Orchestration Leader: As HR needs to evolve from its traditional role as a steward of employment to becoming a steward of work, this function would optimize how work gets done across human, AI, and hybrid teams.
The Skills Evolution: What Changes?
Regardless of which path emerges, HR professionals face a fundamental skills transformation that goes far beyond traditional people management. The future demands a sophisticated blend of strategic, commercial, and technological capabilities.
Strategic Workforce Architecture: The Build-Buy-Borrow-Bot Framework
Traditional talent models are breaking down, requiring HR to master the "4B Framework" - Build internal capability, Buy specialized talent, Borrow flexible resources, or Bot repetitive work through AI and automation. This isn't just about hiring strategy; it's about understanding when skill obsolescence is happening faster than ever before, with up to 15% of requisite skills today becoming automated within the next three years.
HR professionals must become capability architects, making real-time decisions about whether to:
Build: Develop internal talent through upskilling and reskilling programs
Buy: Recruit permanent employees for critical skills gaps
Borrow: Leverage contingent workers, freelancers, or strategic partnerships
Bot: Automate tasks using AI, robotics, or digital technologies
The "5Bs" evolution adds "Bind" - retaining and engaging existing talent, recognizing that in a world where human knowledge doubles every 12 hours and half of all skills may become obsolete within two years due to AI, keeping people adaptable becomes as important as acquiring new capabilities.
Commercial Acumen: The Business Literacy Imperative
Business acumen is the strongest predictor of business impact, yet it's underdeveloped in HR, with 4 in 10 CHROs considering it the most lacking skill in HR talent. This isn't just about understanding finance—it's about context interpretation, customer orientation, and strategic alignment with organizational dynamics and market forces.
Future HR professionals need:
Market Intelligence: Market awareness involving staying informed about market trends, customer preferences, and industry dynamics, with the ability to anticipate changes in consumer behavior and identify emerging opportunities
Financial Fluency: Understanding what drives cash flow, how to maximize profit and minimize loss, and comprehending all aspects of monetary transactions and economic value
Competitive Benchmarking: External perspective on talent costs, practices, and market positioning
Value Creation Mindset: Understanding how to actively generate economic worth through strategic workforce investments
Systems Thinking: The Meta-Skill for Interconnected Organizations
Perhaps the most critical capability for future HR professionals is systems thinking—a way of understanding and analyzing complex systems by examining the interconnections and relationships among their components, looking beyond individual parts and considering the entire system as a whole.
Why Systems Thinking Matters for HR: Issues such as poor performance, low morale or stress among the workforce often result from problems within the system itself. HR's focus must be on making the systems problems visible—and not blaming the workforce for problems that are, in practice, design flaws in how the processes and systems are configured.
Core Systems Thinking Capabilities:
Interconnectedness Mapping: Understanding how actions have consequences, not always the ones intended, and seeing problems through a wide lens, recognizing how interconnected we are
Feedback Loop Design: Balancing and reinforcing feedback loops within an organization serve as guidance for making adjustments as we learn more about the interconnectedness of the elements of the system and their outcomes
Causality Understanding: The flows of influence between the many interconnected parts within a system, providing improved perspective on relationships and feedback loops
Systems Mapping: Visually mapping out the many interrelated elements of a complex system to develop interventions, shifts, or policy decisions that will dramatically change the system in the most effective way
In Practice: When implementing AI-powered performance management systems, systems thinkers don't just focus on the technology. They map how it connects to manager capabilities, employee motivation, organizational culture, business strategy, and external market conditions. They anticipate ripple effects and design interventions that optimize the whole system, not just individual components.
Critical Thinking and Strategic Agility
Strategic thinking and agility—the ability to not only plan long-term strategies but also adapt quickly to changing circumstances, seizing opportunities and mitigating risks by being flexible and responsive—becomes essential as traditional organizational structures flatten and work becomes more fluid.
Critical thinking skills include:
Complexity Navigation: Making sense out of complexity and an uncertain future, with cognizance of the implications of choices for all affected parties
Emergent Thinking: Understanding the outcomes of synergies that can come about as the elements of a system interact with each other in nonlinear ways
Scenario Planning: Complete job redesign thinking that asks "what is the human part of our business?" and how work can be broken apart, reassembled, and optimized
AI Collaboration Skills (Beyond Prompt Engineering)
While basic prompt engineering may become automated through agentic AI, deeper AI collaboration skills become critical:
AI Strategy Design: Understanding when and how to deploy AI for maximum human-machine synergy
Algorithmic Governance: Ensuring AI systems operate ethically and transparently across all people processes
Human-AI Integration: Designing workflows that leverage the unique strengths of both humans and machines
AI Impact Assessment: Evaluating the organizational and societal implications of AI deployment decisions
Data Fluency and People Analytics
Effective use of data in decision-making through people analytics and talent / workforce intelligence allows tracking of metrics such as employee turnover, retention rates, and engagement scores, with predictive analytics forecasting trends for future HR initiatives all whilst understanding the external benchmark and context. But this goes beyond traditional HR metrics to include:
Workforce Intelligence: Real-time skills mapping and gap analysis
Predictive Modeling: Anticipating capability needs based on business strategy and market trends
Performance Benchmarking: Comparing KPIs like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and training ROI against industry standards
Cultural and Change Leadership
As organizations transform into hybrid human-AI entities, HR professionals must become:
Transformation Orchestrators: Leading organizational change in the face of continuous technological disruption
Culture Architects: Designing cultures that embrace both human creativity and AI augmentation
Change Agents: Building skills in strategic thinking, change management, and team leadership through leadership development programs
The fundamental shift is from HR as a support function to HR as strategic intelligence—understanding not just people, but the intersection of human potential, artificial intelligence, market dynamics, and organizational strategy. These aren't nice-to-have skills; they're survival requirements for the HR function itself.
The Naming Question: What's in a Title?
The evolution from CHRO to CPO reflects deeper philosophical shifts. The CPO is a newer, more people-centric title that reflects a shift in how organizations start to recognize the value of people in long-term business success. But even "Chief People Officer" may prove insufficient for the AI era.
Consider these emerging possibilities:
Chief Human-AI Integration Officer: Explicitly acknowledging the hybrid nature of future work
Chief Organizational Intelligence Officer: Focusing on all forms of intelligence within the organization
Chief Experience & Culture Officer: Expanding beyond people to encompass all stakeholder experiences
The Critical Choice Ahead
The future of HR won't be determined by technology alone but by the choices leaders make today. Organizations are moving beyond experimentation, delivering measurable, enterprise-wide transformation, and HR functions that don't prepare risk being left behind.
The cyborg model offers a familiar evolution—enhancing human capabilities without replacing human judgment. The android model promises radical efficiency through deep integration with technology systems. The metamorphosis model suggests that the entire concept of "human resources" may be obsolete.
Each path has merit, but the winning approach likely combines elements of all three: the human-centricity of the cyborg, the technical integration of the android, and the innovative thinking of complete metamorphosis.
The Bottom Line
The future of HR isn't about choosing between human and artificial intelligence—it's about creating new forms of organizational intelligence that neither could achieve alone. Whether we call it HR, People Operations, or something entirely new, the function that emerges will be unrecognizable from today's administrative-heavy departments.
Within 20 years the top three executive positions will be chief executive officer, chief financial officer and chief people officer, predicts Stanford's Nicholas Bloom. But that "chief people officer" will be as different from today's CHRO as a smartphone is from a rotary phone—same basic purpose, completely different capabilities.
The organizations that thrive will be those that embrace this transformation now, building the hybrid capabilities that will define competitive advantage in the age of artificial intelligence. The question isn't whether HR will change—it's whether it will lead that change or be consumed by it.