HR Beyond Forms and Processes

🤷♀️ What am I going to do when AI replaces HR? I am going to throw a party!! 🎉 🥳 I can't wait. Not because I'm naive about what's coming. I've spent years watching genuinely important work get buried under contracts, compliance, and policy documentation. Necessary? Yes. The best use of a psychology-led HR practitioner? Absolutely not. 🦹♀️ My superpower has never been administration. It's reading the space between people. The tension in a leadership team that nobody's naming. The cultural undercurrent that's quietly undermining a strategy. The moment a group shifts from performing to truly connecting. That's the work I was built for. AI is going to clear the path to it. The transactional layer of HR, the parts most vulnerable to human error, the parts that expand to fill every available hour... that's what's going away. In its place? Time. Focus. The ability to finally show up fully in the work that actually moves organisations forward. As long as there are humans, there will be a need for someone who deeply understands them. I'm not worried about the future of my profession. AI is already changing HR and I'm so ready for it! 🤩

This is such an interesting perspective because I honestly don’t think AI will replace the human side of HR. The administrative and repetitive tasks? Absolutely. But emotional intelligence, reading people, navigating conflict, building trust, understanding workplace dynamics, and creating real human connection? That still requires people. If anything, I think AI has the potential to give HR professionals more time to focus on the parts of the role that actually matter most.

🤷♀️ What am I going to do when AI replaces HR? I am going to throw a party!! 🎉 🥳 I can't wait. Not because I'm naive about what's coming. I've spent years watching genuinely important work get buried under contracts, compliance, and policy documentation. Necessary? Yes. The best use of a psychology-led HR practitioner? Absolutely not. 🦹♀️ My superpower has never been administration. It's reading the space between people. The tension in a leadership team that nobody's naming. The cultural undercurrent that's quietly undermining a strategy. The moment a group shifts from performing to truly connecting. That's the work I was built for. AI is going to clear the path to it. The transactional layer of HR, the parts most vulnerable to human error, the parts that expand to fill every available hour... that's what's going away. In its place? Time. Focus. The ability to finally show up fully in the work that actually moves organisations forward. As long as there are humans, there will be a need for someone who deeply understands them. I'm not worried about the future of my profession. AI is already changing HR and I'm so ready for it! 🤩

We’re hosting an HR Leaders Breakfast in Farnborough next week focused on: 👉 AI in HR, Unfiltered: What’s Actually Working and Who is in Control? AI tools are being rolled out at pace. Some are delivering genuine value. Others are quietly failing. At the same time, a bigger question is emerging, Who actually owns AI in your organisation AND how is it being governed? We’ll be tackling two key themes during the discussion: 1️⃣ AI Tools in HR: What’s genuinely worth using right now and what isn’t? 2️⃣ AI Governance: Who owns AI in your organisation? HR? IT? Legal? Operations? What are you actually doing about governance and accountability? ❓Before the session, I’d love to hear from my network: 🔵 Which AI tools are proving genuinely useful in HR? 🔵 Where have you seen overhype or disappointing results? 🔵 Who is leading AI governance in your organisation? 🔵 Are you creating formal policies yet, or still experimenting? 📩 Interested to hear the honest, unfiltered reality from across the market.

I asked AI what people want from HR, this is what it told me..... 'Most people don’t want HR, they want what HR is supposed to deliver when it’s working properly'. The gap in achieving those things is (in AI’s opinion), a HR industry reputational problem. Employees want fairness, consistency, decisions that make sense and someone actually listening to them. They don’t really trust HR but want them to step in on bad behaviour and have trust that HR won’t sweep things under the carpet. Managers on the other hand don’t want the fluffy stuff. They want quick, practical help with real advice, not a policy recited to them. The view taken by AI is that if a manager thinks HR will slow something down, they won’t involve them (and we all know where that will get them!). So, where’s the balance? It’s the business owners it seems, they want HR that solves the problems while causing minimal disruption. Clear, confident no nonsense guidance by knowing someone with the right skill set has provided it, for the good of the managers and the employees. Which is great, as that’s just the type of business owners I love working with! What do you think, has AI got it right or wrong, does each position in a company want something different from HR? My opinion is that everyone can have what they want out of HR, they just need to have the right people supporting them in the function.

Show me the org chart for AI policy training in your company. I'll wait. In most orgs it doesn't exist. The policy got written (Legal). The tools got procured (IT). The vendor demo got watched. But the actual training that turns "we have an AI policy" into "people know what they can and can't do" hasn't been assigned to anyone. It's a footnote in five different roadmaps and a deliverable on none. SHRM's 2026 State of AI in HR report puts numbers to it. Legal and compliance lead AI governance in 37% of organizations. Cross-functional task forces lead AI upskilling in 29%. HR is right behind on upskilling (28%), but only 15% of HR professionals think HR should own training employees to use AI tools. So the people writing the policy aren't the people building the training, and the people building the training don't think it's their job either. This is fine until it isn't. The EU AI Act's Article 4 literacy obligation has been in force since February 2025; enforcement starts August 2026. (And yes, it reaches U.S. companies with EU operations, contractors included.) Domestically, 19 of the most populous U.S. states now have AI-related employment rules on the books. Three questions worth answering before someone else asks them: When the AI policy changes, who updates the training? When a new AI tool rolls out, who decides what training comes with it? When a regulator asks for proof of training completion, who pulls the records? If the answer is "we'll figure that out," figure it out before August. #AIGovernance #LearningAndDevelopment #AIReadiness #AIEnablement https://lnkd.in/gsytj85w

“AI will make HR more efficient.” That is true. It is also the wrong standard. AI will draft faster, summarize faster, organize documentation, guide managers, improve access to policy, and surface patterns more quickly. That has value. But efficiency is not control. AI does not give HR authority. It does not make executives follow the process. It does not force managers to apply standards consistently. It does not correct incentives that reward the behavior the policy prohibits. It does not protect employees when leadership refuses to enforce consequences. That is the distinction most AI-in-HR conversations are avoiding. The problem in many organizations is not that HR lacks tools. It is that HR lacks decision control when the standard becomes inconvenient. AI improves the apparatus around HR. It does not enforce the standard. The real question is not whether HR should use AI. Of course it should. The question is whether AI is strengthening governance or helping the organization look modern while leaving the authority problem untouched. Full article is linked in the first comment.

Is AI going to take your HR job? 100% and I'll tell you why that's great news. Most HR execs I know are buried in admin work. When what they really want is to have some time for strategic-level thinking because they know they have a lot to offer the organization. The good news is that AI is already able to handle many of the things that keep you from doing this. Don't fear AI's advance...rather, step into the tools, learn to create agents and set up AI workflows so that AI can take the part of your job away that you shouldn't be doing anyway. If you want to learn how to start using AI to free up your time for higher-level work, then DM me and I'll send you the details for my upcoming AI for HR workshop.

Will AI Replace HR ? No. But HR professionals who do not understand AI may be replaced by those who do. Ai shifts all functions It strengthens strategic relevance and performance. As an HR professional ready to elevate an organization, it’s important to evolve with the tech through knowing better ways on how they are used. Position well and start avoiding that much of paper work. Thursday 🇿🇲 Owen Katongo Kabanda Patrick Nyambe

How quickly can your HR team adapt to new circumstances? I’ve been having conversations with P&C teams about what it really means to have an AI-first strategy. And one thing is becoming very clear: AI in HR will not succeed with old HR ways of working. We cannot unlock the value by staying in the comfortable. Not with big perfect plans. Not with endless sign-offs. Not with steering group reviews for every agent, workflow, or experiment. That world was built for predictability. AI development is not predictable. When we develop AI solutions in HR, we are dealing with uncertainty, learning, ethics, adoption, behavior change, and fast-moving technology — all at once. So the question is not only: “How do we use AI in HR?” It is also: “How do we need to think and work differently to succeed with AI in HR?” Doing things how you've always done things will end up with you just failing slower. Read that again. Failing slower. Instead of learning fast. 🚀 If you are serious about setting your teams, OD and governance up to succeed with your AI-first strategy, we at Agile HR Community can help. If you aren't yet - we're right here waiting, until you are! 😎