Why CHROs are the key to unlocking the potential of AI for the workforce

It’s no longer a question of whether AI will transform business and the workforce, but how it will happen. A study by the IBM® Institute for Business Value revealed that nearly 60% of CEOs surveyed believe that competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI.

With so many leaders now looking to embrace the technology for business transformation, some wonder which C-Suite leader will be in the driver’s seat to orchestrate and accelerate that change.

Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) are perfectly positioned to lead the workforce into the future by championing a culture of growth and learning, while taking the lead on both people skills and AI skills. Here’s how CHROs can seize the opportunity.

Successfully implementing technology depends on having the right operating model and talent to manage it. Employees need to understand how to use the technology and buy in to adopting it. It is fundamentally a leadership and change journey, not a technology journey.

Organizations will seek to increase the overall technical acumen of their workforce and make sure that they have a basic understanding of AI so they can be both critical thinkers and users of the technology. Here, CHROs can lean into their expertise and play a critical role moving forward—up-skilling people, creating cultures of growth mindset and learning and driving sustained organizational change.

For employees to get the most out of AI, they need to understand how to prompt it, evaluate its outputs and then refine and modify. For example, when you engage with a generative AI-powered assistant, you will get very different responses if you ask it to “describe it to an executive” versus “describe it to a fifth-grader.” Employees also need to be educated and empowered to ask the right questions about AI’s outputs and source data and analyze them for accuracy, bias and more.

Today, many businesses may no longer only be focusing on finding the human talent they need to execute their business strategy. They should be thinking more broadly about how to build, buy, borrow or “bot” the skills needed for the present and future.

The CHRO’s primary challenge is to orchestrate the new human plus AI workforce. Top CHROs can work on this challenge, using their comprehensive understanding of the workforce and how to design roles and skills within an operating model to best leverage the strengths of both humans and AI.

In the past, this involved analyzing the roles that the business needs to execute its strategy, breaking those roles down into their essential skills and tasks and developing a skilling and hiring strategy to address any gaps. Going forward, that means assessing job descriptions, identifying the tasks best suited to technology and the tasks best suited to people and redesigning the roles and the work itself.

As top CHROs collaborate with their C-Suite colleages to redefine roles and adapt task execution through AI and automation, they are likely considering the technology roadmap for skills. With a clear skills roadmap established, they can play a key role in building AI-powered solutions that fit the business’ needs.

HR leaders have the deep expertise in training best practices that can inform not only how people are trained for skills, but how the AI solutions themselves are trained.

To train a generative AI assistant to learn project management, for example, you need a strong set of unstructured data about the work and tasks required. HR leaders are typically knowledgable about the steps to take around sourcing and evaluating content for training, collaborating with the functional subject matter experts for that area.

That’s only the beginning. Going forward, business leaders should also consider how to validate, test and certify these skills of the AI.

Imagine an AI solution trained to support accountants with key accounting tasks. How can businesses test and monitor their AI solution’s capabilities and ensure its outputs are accurate enough? HR leaders have the experience and knowledge of leading practices around training and more that businesses will need to implement this new technology.

While we’re still in the early phases of the age of AI, leading CHROs have a pulse on the anticipated impact of these powerful technologies. Those who can seize the moment to build a workforce and skills strategy that makes the most of employees plus responsibly utilized AI will be poised to succeed.