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Ever since Human Resources began stretching beyond its beginnings as Personnel and Payroll, HR leaders have clamored for a seat at the table.

Now they have it. And the table, it turns out, is piled high with growing expectations:

Organizations are looking for their CHROs, among many other things, to usher in the era of the AI-assisted employee, to create a workforce that can do more with less, and to close skill gaps that threaten to topple critical business initiatives. 

Could the CH in CHRO stand for crosshairs?

Possibly, but Amber Grewal, the chief talent officer at Boston Conulting Group (BCG), and Eric Dozier, the chief people officer at Eli Lilly, have both expressed delight at being, well, center stage. 

“As I think about how HR has evolved,” Amber says, “this is the most exciting time.”

Amber and Eric each recently spoke with Aneesh Raman, the chief economic officer at LinkedIn, for our new video series Conversations with CHROs. Here are some of the highlights from those conversations.

1. Understand that the scope of HR has changed — dramatically

HR is no longer a mere back-office function. Today, it carries the hopes of the organization on its shoulders.

“The business of HR is the business of the company, actually,” Eric says. “And so the opportunity is there to make sure you understand how the organization achieves its objectives, understand how the organization creates value through its innovations. And then how does HR help connect that to the things that we do.”

Clearly, the contemporary CHRO not only needs to be a people leader, they must be a business leader too.

“What I’m most excited about,” Amber says, “is that HR is no longer just about managing people and managing process. HR now is about business transformation and creating business value through designing an archetype of what the future workforce is going to look like. What is this collaboration of AI and human capability coming together to unlock human potential?”

There is a beautiful irony in how the increasing importance of business technology is simultaneously increasing the importance of the workforce and the skills — soft skills, human skills, whatever you’d like to call them — that people uniquely bring to the workplace.

2. Practice, not perfection, should be your goal

With so much to do, where should CHROs even start?

“You’re dealing with people,” Eric says, “and there’s this challenge to be perfect all the time. But my point is as long as we can iterate, we don’t have to be perfect. Let’s embrace it and launch things.”

Perfection isn’t the goal — it’s the enemy.

“We have to move faster,” Eric says. “We expect these tools to be at a certain perfection level, and the reality is they only get better through utilization. They only get better from understanding and being exposed to more of your data. I’m challenging and encouraging our team to embrace the technology that’s already within the existing tools.” 

At BCG, they’re also creating the conditions for employees to roll up their sleeves and experiment.

“We’re creating a culture of enablement,” Amber says, “whether that is AI amplify days or learning from champions. But we’re all figuring it out.” 

Some 77% of the BCG workforce, she says, is already leveraging generative AI. “We’re also customizing for our own use cases,” Amber says. “We’re seeing that with GPT [generative pre-trained transformer] creation — we have about 9,000 GPTs that our teams have created.”

3. Embrace the need for new roles and new skills

HR has irrefutably come a long way since its days as Personnel, but personnel — people! — are still at the heart of the function’s opportunities and responsibilities.

“At the core,” Eric says, “Lilly is only successful because of its people. We have to have the ability to continue to find great talent.” He says his team has “aggressively sought new talent,” and he points to their recent hiring of their first-ever chief AI officer, as an example.

“People are the core to what we do,” echoes Amber, who is focused not just on the talent needed today but the workforce BCG will need in the future.

As she weighs talent needs, Amber prioritizes “holistic intelligence,” which she sees as a combination of IQ, EQ, and what she calls SQ — “self intelligence, the ability to be self-aware and to also know why you do what you do.”

4. Leverage AI to create a skills-based workforce

Both Eric and Amber see the emerging wave of AI tools as a way to move to what Eric terms a “skills economy.” He sees AI as a tool to ensure that recruiting, hiring, talent, and mobility practices are all made more objective. “The more we can leverage AI,” Eric says, “the more we can use it to assess your skills and match you with different jobs where you can be successful.” 

Amber sees AI shifting which skills companies look for in talent and develop in their workforce. She notes that in the past companies have often been tightly focused on hard skills and IQ, and, she says, AI is going to be able to do a lot of that.

“There’s an opportunity,” Amber says, “where AI will help us go back to this human aspect of what makes us unique — purpose-driven and connected-relationship work. It’s going to unlock even more innovation and creativity.

Final thoughts: CHROs are the architects of the new workforce and our future CEOs

In his conversations with both Amber and Eric, Aneesh postulates that CHROs will be the future CEOs. “As we move to a new economy where people skills come to the center of organizational success,” he explains, “knowing talent and having the best talent situated in the best organizational structure is going to be how organizations win, and that’s a skill set that obviously the talent function has.”

Talent leaders are well positioned to rewire the labor market and remake work.

“What excites me,” Amber says, “is that HR is moving toward being the architects of a new workforce that doesn’t even exist.”

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