Why CHROs/CPOs and HR Leaders make good Strategic (AI) Partners to the CEO & Executive Bench

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HR is perfectly positioned to shape how AI is designed, deployed, and adopted, ensuring it delivers value while protecting people, culture, and trust.

With AI already dominating boardroom discussions across industries, CHROs/CPOs and other HR leaders are uniquely placed to join in leading the transformation, not simply as passive adopters of AI, but as architects of a more human-centred, high-performing workplace.

AI is rapidly transforming the HR landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance efficiency, improve decision-making, and create more personalised employee experiences.

With touchpoints spanning the entire employee lifecycle, HR is perfectly positioned to shape how AI is designed, deployed, and adopted, ensuring it delivers value while protecting people, culture, and trust.

For CHROs/CPOs and HR professionals, particularly those without a technical background, understanding the fundamental concepts of AI is the first crucial step towards leveraging its potential responsibly and effectively. This also enables HR professionals to be better positioned to ask and respond to key questions raised at the early “Build or Buy” AI upstream stage, including issues related to data quality and quantity.

Unlike SaaS, where adoption can be confined to a single department, AI’s reach extends across every business function, making its selection, integration, and governance not just a technical choice, but a leadership decision too. With touchpoints spanning the entire employee lifecycle, HR is perfectly positioned to shape how AI is designed, deployed, and adopted, ensuring it delivers value while protecting people, culture, and trust.

Why HR Must also Lead the AI Conversation - From recruitment to exit, HR is the main function with direct, ongoing contact across all areas of an organisation. This gives its leaders the insights, influence, and relationships needed to:

• Ensure AI is designed and implemented with fairness, inclusion, and ethics at its core

• Build trust by balancing AI-driven insights with transparency and explainability

• Anticipate and address adoption challenges, from varying levels of AI literacy to fears about job security

• Champion AI Literacy programmes that meet people where they are, rather than assuming uniform technical expertise

AI is not just a tool for efficiency; it’s a capability-enhancement opportunity. Framed correctly, it frees HR from repetitive, low-value tasks, allowing focus on the human-centred work of building candidate pipelines, while internally, building connections, belonging, and purpose.

Opportunities for CHROs - AI can already support HR leaders in:

1. Attraction & Recruitment - Sourcing, screening, and engaging candidates at speed, with personalised employer branding, employer-of-choice awards, and highlighting other positive recognition as well as benefits offered. The opportunity to build candidate pipelines and thus increase recruitment velocity is a must, given recruitment timelines are often cited as reasons why many candidates drop off, resulting in organisations losing top talent at this early stage.

2. Learning & Development - Delivering tailored, adaptive learning journeys aligned with role, skills, and aspirations.

3. Performance Management - Enabling continuous, bias-mitigated feedback aligned to organisational goals.

4. Employee Engagement - Using AI-enabled pulse surveys and analytics to share real-time workforce sentiment with leaders and boards and intervening when top employees are flagged by AI as potential “flight-risk”.

Done well, AI systems can shift decision-making from relying on lagging indicators (annual surveys, retrospective reports including appraisals), to real-time insight dashboards, enabling immediate action, targeted support, and human intervention where necessary.

AI Challenges That Need Addressing - To succeed, CHROs/CPOs must lead on mitigating AI’s risks*. These include:

1. Bias - Algorithmic and data bias can entrench inequality if not addressed upstream at design stage.

2. Data Quality - Fragmented, outdated, or inconsistent data undermines AI’s outputs, a case of “garbage in, garbage out”.

3. Privacy & Security - Protecting sensitive employee information is non-negotiable. A recent YouGov UK poll (7 Aug 2025), found that among SMEs who had no intention of using AI, 49% cited concerns around data privacy and security, while 19% were put off by ethical concerns. Could HR becoming more visible in AI help build trust?

4. Lower than expected Adoption Rates – Access to AI does not, in and of itself, guarantee adoption. Poor uptake is often caused by poor communication, lack of trust, or AI tools being seen as too complex - particularly if interfaces differ greatly from the tools, employees are used to.

5. Hallucinations & Explainability - Inaccurate outputs erode confidence, especially if AI reasoning cannot be explained.

*I will dig deeper into the points raised above, in future editions of this HR-AI Newsletter.

So, if you’re a CHRO/CPO, where and how do you position yourself as an AI strategic partner and where do you begin?

As things currently stand, most HR leaders are AI-takers rather than AI-makers. This needs to change quickly or a few years down the line,

HR leaders will find themselves fire-fighting problems brought on by unexplainable AI decisions known as the “black box”. We will dig deeper into this in future editions but below we share:

A Practical Roadmap for CHROs/CPOs & HR Professionals. Begin by looking at HR itself (Processes, Procedures, Policies etc). After all, whatever goal or reasons the CEO has for implementing AI (growth, efficiency, new markets/products), almost all will require new and/or upskilled talent. HR therefore, needs to keep up and this may likely mean adopting AI tools too. So:

1. Define the Business Problem -  What problem(s) are you trying to solve with AI? Are you reducing friction or unlocking potential? Basically clarify what you're solving and whether AI is the right tool (it could just be automation that you need, rather then AI, for example).

2. Build a Data Foundation – AI relies on good quality data. Standardise, clean, and integrate HR data; ensure governance policies meet GDPR and other standards.

3. Collaborate Cross-Functionally - Involve IT, legal/compliance, IOs, DEI, finance, and L&D from the outset. AI is not just a technical project. While it requires data scientists and engineers, often what is missing is input and contribution from diverse (non-technical) domain experts.

4. Champion AI Literacy - Equip leaders and teams to understand, question, and responsibly use AI. Address questions openly and manage expectations about what AI can and cannot do. Meet people where they are; not everyone will be able to hit the ground running. Some may require a different, perhaps, step-by-step, approach.

5. Embed Ethical Principles - Fairness, transparency, and explainability must be integral, not an afterthought. With HR included from the outset, ethical principles can be built in, rather than bolted on (downstream) after deployment.

6. Implement Safeguards - Control how employees interact with AI systems. Explain and incorporate these controls into AI Literacy programmes.

7. Track and Communicate Impact - Share successes, lessons, and measurable outcomes with stakeholders to build ongoing support. Encourage AI use through Lunch & Learns and work closely with employees who are trusted by their peers “ internal AI influencers”, so to speak. C-Level executives will not always be the best people to market AI especially to employees who fear for their jobs or are resistant because of other reasons.

The Call to Lead - AI adoption is no longer a “nice to have” – it’s fast becoming a business-critical investment. Yet technology alone will not determine its success; leadership will. CHROs/CPOs and HR professionals who step forward now, as strategic AI partners to their CEOs, will not only safeguard their organisations against risk, including legal exposure (see Mobley v. Workday, Inc. now a collective action), but also unlock new levels of innovation, performance, and employee engagement.

As one of the few leaders who runs a department that touches every corner of the organisation, the CHRO/CPO has both the responsibility and the opportunity to ensure AI is built for everyone - delivering a workplace that is both “high-tech and high-touch”.

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1. Responsible AI - (This one). Putting People and Culture at the heart of AI strategy

2. Leading with Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

3. Inclusive Leadership in the era of AI

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