Creating People Advantage 2026: Four Power Moves for the CHRO

Your next AI rollout will not succeed on software alone. The real determinant is whether HR can redesign work, build trust in data, and lead the human side of change. 

Google Notebook LM agents dig into the March 2026 Creating People Advantage Report from Boston Consulting Group and the World Federation of People Management Associations, drawing on insights from 7,000 HR and business leaders across 115 markets to show what is actually working inside organisations right now. 

TL;DR / At A Glance

• what the 2026 Creating People Advantage Report reveals across 7,000 leaders in 115 markets
• the widening gap between HR’s current strengths and future priorities
• why “digital solutions” rise fast while digital fluency and analytics lag
• the ROI of high-capability HR teams filling critical roles 17 to 18 days faster
• why GenAI adoption often turns into “party tricks” instead of transformation
• data privacy and compliance as the top barrier to scaled AI in HR
• replacing uncoordinated pilots with a secure AI service layer
• moving from job titles to skills-based matching and a real skills taxonomy
• lessons from a company mapping 350 skills into 60 clusters
• why SMEs prioritise culture, rewards, and upskilling over complex analytics
• regional differences in workforce strategy across Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas
• the looming challenge of agentic AI and a blended human plus digital workforce

We walk through the capability gap: HR remains strongest in compliance, employee relations, and the operational essentials, while “digital solutions” like HR process automation and digital employee experience surge in importance. 

The problem is that digital fluency and people analytics maturity are still near the bottom, so companies buy shiny HR tech and never build the skills or data culture to turn dashboards into decisions. From there, we unpack “capability value” and how to connect talent moves to business outcomes like ramp-up time, unit productivity, and profitability, including the striking data point that high-capability HR teams fill critical roles roughly 17 to 18 days faster. 

Then we tackle the GenAI paradox: widespread experimentation, low perceived relevance, and privacy fears that lead to uncoordinated pilots. We explain what a secure AI-enabled service layer looks like, why it boosts adoption, and how HR can step up to lead enterprise-wide AI change management, job redesign, and upskilling. 

Finally, we shift from job titles to skills-based organisations, explore why regions prioritise differently, and end on the question that changes everything: when agentic AI becomes part of the workforce, who “manages” the digital workers? 

Subscribe for more deep dives on HR strategy, people analytics, digital transformation, and the future of work, and if this sparked a debate, share it with a colleague and leave a review. 

Are you fixing the plumbing or designing the future?

Transcript

HR Becomes The AI Linchpin

Google Agent 2 0:00

What if I told you uh that the success or failure of your company's million-dollar AI rollout over the next five years won't depend on your chief technology officer.

Google Agent 1 0:11

Right.

Google Agent 2 0:11

But on the person currently running your payroll. I mean, it sounds completely counterintuitive.

Google Agent 1 0:17

Yeah, it really does.

Google Agent 2 0:18

Aaron Powell But if you've been treating your human resources department like, you know, the building's maintenance crew, the folks you only call when you need to fix a leaky pipe or resolve a complaint, you might be setting your entire enterprise up to fail.

Google Agent 1 0:31

Aaron Ross Powell You absolutely are. That traditional view of HR is rapidly becoming a massive liability. Right. The stakes have genuinely never been higher for the chief human resources officer of the CHRO to uh to step out of the back office and really step into the role of a strategic architect.

Google Agent 2 0:47

Aaron Powell Because the landscape is just moving too fast.

Google Agent 1 0:49

Aaron Powell Exactly. The business landscape is evolving so quickly that the foundational plumbing of HR, I mean, it's still necessary, obviously, but it is no longer sufficient to maintain a competitive advantage.

Inside The Global HR Research

Google Agent 2 0:59

Aaron Powell Well, welcome to today's deep dive. We are unpacking a massive, freshly released piece of research from March 2026. It's the Creating People Advantage Report. It's a huge one. Yeah, it's a joint effort by Boston Consulting Group and the World Federation of People Management Associations. And just to frame the sheer scale of the data you are getting today, we're looking at insights from over 7,000 HR and business leaders. Wow. Spread across 115 markets and uh 25 different industries.

Google Agent 1 1:31

Aaron Powell The scale of that data provides a truly global cross-sectional view of what is actually happening inside the world's biggest companies right now.

Google Agent 2 1:38

It's not just theory.

Google Agent 1 1:39

No, it moves way beyond the theoretical buzzwords and shows us the hard numbers of how organizations are adapting or you know, failing to adapt to an entirely new paradigm of work.

Google Agent 2 1:48

Aaron Powell Right. So our mission today is to explore this fundamental transformation. The HR department is basically being asked to design the structural integrity of the business, drive outsized value, and lead an enterprise-wide AI transformation.

Google Agent 1 2:01

Aaron Powell Which is a tall order. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Google Agent 2 2:02

It is. But to understand where HR is going, we first have to look at what they are currently prioritizing versus well, what they're actually good at right now.

The Capability Gap In HR

Google Agent 1 2:12

Aaron Powell Yeah, we have to analyze the capability gap. If you look at the baseline data, many HR teams are currently struggling to make this leap. They're caught between the traditional administrative demands of the job and the future strategic demands of the business.

Google Agent 2 2:27

Aaron Powell Okay, let's unpack this. The report asked these 7,000 leaders to rank 28 different people management topics. And it reveals this glaring disconnect. Right. When you look at what HR functions report being the strongest in, it's all those foundational areas. We're talking about compliance, employee relations, basic recruiting, health and safety.

Google Agent 1 2:46

Aaron Powell Right, because these are the areas where HR has spent the last 50 years building its muscle memory.

Google Agent 2 2:51

Exactly.

Google Agent 1 2:52

Organizations are exceptionally comfortable managing policies, running payroll, mitigating legal risk. It's a well-oiled machine.

Google Agent 2 2:59

But then you look at what they say is important for the future, and the story changes entirely. Traditional topics are still there, obviously, but a category called digital solutions, which means things like HR process automation and digital employee experiences, made a massive leap.

Google Agent 1 3:15

Yeah, a huge jump.

Google Agent 2 3:17

It jumped 13 ranks to become the 12th most important topic overall. Suddenly, every HR leader is realizing they need to digitize their workflows.

Google Agent 1 3:27

Because the old manual ways of working are simply no longer viable at scale. I mean, the pressure to automate workflows and provide a seamless, you know, consumer-grade digital experience for employees is immense.

Google Agent 2 3:39

People want their work apps to work like their phone apps.

Google Agent 1 3:42

Exactly. Employees now expect their internal corporate systems to be as intuitive and frictionless as the stuff they use at home.

Google Agent 2 3:49

I have to challenge the reality of this though. If digital solutions are suddenly skyrocketing in importance, why are current capabilities in digital fluency and analytics maturity ranked among the absolute lowest in the entire survey? My theory is that companies are throwing millions of dollars at Sauce vendors, buying the software, but treating it like a magic wand.

Google Agent 1 4:08

Oh, 100%.

Google Agent 2 4:10

They think the tool itself is the strategy, and they completely ignore the human element of implementing it.

Google Agent 1 4:16

What's fascinating here is that you've hit on the classic gap between purchasing technology and actually adopting it. Right. Organizations have the cloud systems, they have the integrated platforms, but they haven't built the underlying data culture. And more importantly, they haven't built the internal skills within the HR team to translate those shiny new systems into actual decision-making support. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Google Agent 2 4:40

Because it's a different skill set.

Google Agent 1 4:41

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Exactly. The HR profession historically attracted people who were passionate about human psychology and organizational behavior, not necessarily statistical modeling or uh data architecture. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Google Agent 2 4:54

It's like buying a Formula One car but never bothering to learn how to drive a manual transmission.

Google Agent 1 4:58

Trevor Burrus That's a great way to put it.

Google Agent 2 4:59

Trevor Burrus, Jr. You have all this power sitting in the dashboard, but you're still just driving it around a parking lot in first gear.

unknown 5:04

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Google Agent 1 5:04

Yeah. You can have the most sophisticated analytics dashboard in the world. But if your team doesn't know how to look at that data, identify the anomalies, and pull out a strategic insight that helps a business unit leader make a better decision.

Google Agent 2 5:17

Aaron Powell The software is useless.

Proving HR Value With ROI

Google Agent 1 5:18

Aaron Powell It's practically useless, yeah.

Google Agent 2 5:20

Aaron Powell So we've established that HR desperately needs to upgrade its digital skills. But let's move beyond just talking about capabilities and dive into the why. Okay. We need to transition to the bottom line return on investment. Why does closing this gap actually matter to the CEO and the CFO?

Google Agent 1 5:39

Because the C-suite doesn't care about HR metrics for the sake of HR metrics.

Google Agent 2 5:43

Right. They want numbers.

Google Agent 1 5:44

They care about business metrics. This brings us to a critical concept in the report, which is capability value. For decades, HR has measured its own success by administrative volume.

Google Agent 2 5:55

Time to hire. Everyone's favorite vanity metric.

Google Agent 1 5:57

Oh, yes.

Google Agent 2 5:58

Or, you know, tracking how many employees completed a mandatory compliance training module by Friday.

Google Agent 1 6:04

Yeah, time to hire is a perfect example. It tells you absolutely nothing about whether the person you hired actually move the needle on your company's strategic goals.

Google Agent 2 6:12

Nothing at all.

Google Agent 1 6:13

Capability value forces HR to stop measuring volume and start measuring how talent decisions directly affect profitability, innovation, and productivity. It's about linking the investment in people directly to the financial outcome.

Google Agent 2 6:26

But how does a company actually measure something like capability value in practice? Like how do you move from a soft metric to a hard financial one without just guessing?

Google Agent 1 6:36

It requires shifting the focus to the downstream business outcomes generated by those hires. So instead of just tracking how fast a position was filled, you measure the ramp up time to full productivity for that new hire.

Google Agent 2 6:49

Okay, that makes sense.

Google Agent 1 6:50

How does their integration into the team impact overall unit profitability or project delivery speed? You take the sales data, the production data, or the code deployment metrics, and you overlay your talent data right on top of it.

Google Agent 2 7:02

Finding the connection.

Google Agent 1 7:03

Right. You are actively searching for the mathematical correlation between your people strategy and your revenue generation.

Google Agent 2 7:10

The report actually backs this up with some incredibly concrete ROI stats for you guys listening.

Google Agent 1 7:16

Yeah, the numbers are wild.

Google Agent 2 7:17

For instance, organizations with high capabilities and employee well-being, engagement, and sustainability see significantly lower annual turnover rates.

Google Agent 1 7:26

Aaron Powell, which saves massive amounts of money.

Google Agent 2 7:28

Exactly. Retaining institutional knowledge inherently saves money. But the return on investment really becomes clear with high capability HR teams, meaning those that are strong in strategic workforce planning, analytics, and mobility. Those teams fill critical roles 17 to 18 days faster than their peers.

Google Agent 1 7:47

Aaron Powell We really need to pause and think about what 18 days actually means in a competitive business environment.

Google Agent 2 7:52

Yeah.

Google Agent 1 7:52

That is nearly three entire working weeks. Aaron Powell Right.

Google Agent 2 7:55

So if you are a global tech company and your HR department can give the business 18 extra days of productivity from a top-tier software engineer or a senior sales lead closing deals. Exactly. That is real measurable revenue. The return on investment here completely redefines how we should value HR.

Google Agent 1 8:13

It does.

Google Agent 2 8:14

But if hard financial impact is the ultimate goal, should HR teams scrap those traditional softer metrics entirely? Like, should we stop caring about employee engagement scores and just measure something ruthless like profit per employee?

Google Agent 1 8:31

No, no. Scraping engagement scores would be a profound mistake. But engaged employees don't drive profitability, so that human element is still a critical leading indicator of financial performance.

Google Agent 2 8:41

So they still matter.

Google Agent 1 8:42

The strategy is to connect the two. If you have an engagement score of 85 in your engineering department, you should be able to map how that positive culture correlates to faster code deployment and fewer product defects.

Google Agent 2 8:54

The problem is actually finding the time to build those correlations. The data shows that 51% of senior leaders say administrative load is the primary barrier stopping HR from making this strategic contribution.

Google Agent 1 9:04

Yeah, they're buried.

Google Agent 2 9:05

They simply cannot build predictive models when they're drowning in manual paperwork, answering the same five questions about the vacation policy and manually updating spreadsheets.

Gen AI Hype Meets Privacy Reality

Google Agent 1 9:14

Which brings us to the most complex challenge in the modern enterprise. If administrative load is the barrier, artificial intelligence and automation present the obvious solution.

Google Agent 2 9:24

Right.

Google Agent 1 9:24

But the data reveals a fascinating paradox in how companies are actually utilizing these tools.

Google Agent 2 9:29

It's an absolute standoff. The report notes that nearly 70% of respondents are using generative AI in some capacity within HR.

Google Agent 1 9:38

Which sounds great on paper.

Google Agent 2 9:39

Right. They're using it for basic reporting, outlining learning modules, or drafting recruiting emails. Yet, shockingly, only 38% say Gen AI is highly or strongly relevant for their organization today. It's crazy. How can you have 70% of an industry using a tool, but only 38% think it actually matters?

Google Agent 1 9:59

Aaron Powell Because they're using it for party tricks, not fundamental transformation.

Google Agent 2 10:02

Right.

Google Agent 1 10:03

They're using a generative AI chatbot to write a slightly better email, which saves them what, maybe five minutes?

Google Agent 2 10:09

Yes, exactly.

Google Agent 1 10:10

When we look at the barriers preventing real transformation, 51% of respondents point to data privacy and compliance fears as the top hurdle.

Google Agent 2 10:18

Aaron Powell Which is entirely fair. HR deals with the most sensitive data in the entire continent.

Google Agent 1 10:24

Oh, absolutely.

Google Agent 2 10:25

Have salaries, health information, performance reviews, termination records. There's a very real fear of an employee accidentally feeding that sensitive data into a public AI model and causing a massive privacy breach.

Google Agent 1 10:38

Aaron Powell And that fear leads to organizations becoming trapped in what the report calls uncoordinated pilots.

Google Agent 2 10:45

Aaron Powell I love that phrase. Uncoordinated pilots perfectly describes a company where like one manager in marketing is using ChatGPT to write performance reviews, a recruiter in another state is using a sketchy startup tool to screen resumes.

Google Agent 1 10:58

Aaron Powell And none of these systems talk to each other.

Google Agent 2 11:00

It's absolute chaos masquerading as innovation.

Google Agent 1 11:02

Aaron Powell They're playing around with scattered tools to patch individual pain points rather than stepping back and reshaping an end-to-end work stream. It's the difference between using a calculator to do your taxes a little bit faster versus hiring an accountant to entirely restructure your corporate finances.

Google Agent 2 11:18

Oh, that's a good analogy.

Google Agent 1 11:19

The alternative to these scattered pilots is building a cohesive, secure architecture.

Google Agent 2 11:24

And the report shares a brilliant case study of a global tech company that did exactly this. They stopped doing scattered pilots and built a cohesive AI-enabled service layer.

Google Agent 1 11:33

Yes.

Google Agent 2 11:34

They use virtual assistants and digital workers to handle common transactions, routing, and forms with a seamless handoff to humans for complex cases. It's a game changer. Mechanically speaking, how does an AI service layer actually function within an HR setting to bypass those privacy fears?

Google Agent 1 11:50

Aaron Powell Well, think of it as a secure central nervous system for all employee requests. Instead of an employee emailing an HR rep to figure out their maternity leave policy or to change their tax withholding, they interact with a unified digital interface. The AI parses the natural language, dips into the secured internal database, which, by the way, completely circumvents those privacy fears by keeping the data entirely in-house.

Google Agent 2 12:15

Right, never leaves the server.

Google Agent 1 12:16

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Exactly. And then it executes the transaction autonomously. If the request involved a nuanced human issue, like an interpersonal conflict or a complex career pathing question, the AI packages the context of the conversation and seamlessly routes it to a specialized human HR partner.

Google Agent 2 12:34

The results of that holistic approach were staggering. Manager adoption hit 93%.

Google Agent 1 12:41

Huge. That is giving the business back thousands of hours of time.

Google Agent 2 12:59

It really is.

Google Agent 1 13:00

If we connect this to the bigger picture, we have to look outside the HR department. CEOs across the globe are heavily investing in AI across the entire company in supply chain, marketing, operations. Everywhere. But who is managing the human impact of that massive operational shift?

Google Agent 2 13:14

Aaron Powell Usually they leave it to the IT department, which you know focuses on the software rollout but completely ignores the fact that humans actually have to use it.

Google Agent 1 13:21

Exactly. If HR doesn't step up to manage the people side of this massive AI rollout, things like job redesign, change management, and upskilling the existing staff to work alongside these new tools, the entire enterprise transformation will fail. The CEO desperately needs HR to lead the human element of the digital revolution.

HR Leads Enterprise AI Change

Google Agent 2 13:41

Aaron Powell Here is where it gets really interesting, though. You can automate processes with AI all day long. You can have the best virtual assistants and the cleanest internal data lakes. Right. But at the end of the day, you still need human beings to execute new business strategy. And that requires a fundamental shift in how we view the workforce itself. We have to talk about the skills obsession.

Google Agent 1 14:02

The transition from managing static roles to managing dynamic skills.

Google Agent 2 14:06

There's so much talk out there in the corporate world about skills-based hiring and becoming a skills-based organization, but the data is sobering.

Google Agent 1 14:15

Very sobering.

Google Agent 2 14:16

Only 54% of organizations actually use skills-based matching to place individuals into future roles. And because a mere 11% have actually bothered to build a full skills taxonomy like mapping out every capability their workforce possesses, the rest of the market is essentially flying blind.

Google Agent 1 14:35

Think about your own company's organizational chart right now. How many people are locked into a job title that uses only 10 or 20% of what they're actually capable of?

Google Agent 2 14:44

It's like buying a multi-tool Swiss Army knife, but only ever using the screwdriver because the box labeled it screwdriver.

Google Agent 1 14:50

Right.

From Job Titles To Skills Markets

Google Agent 2 14:51

You are completely ignoring the knife, the pliers, the bottle opener. By ignoring the other skills an employee has beyond their official job description, companies are wasting massive amounts of human potential.

Google Agent 1 15:02

It's an incredibly inefficient way to run a business, especially when the half-life of technical skills is shrinking so rapidly. Oh, yeah. What you learned five years ago might be entirely obsolete today, but your underlying aptitude for problem solving or project management remains highly valuable.

Google Agent 2 15:17

The report highlights a real-world example of an industrial goods company that figured this out. And it's a brilliant playbook. They were facing intense cost pressures, they had massive digital ambitions, and they needed to double their production capacity in five years.

Google Agent 1 15:32

And when you're under cost pressure, you can't just go out and hire twice as many people.

Google Agent 2 15:36

Exactly. Instead of trying to hire more people with traditional job titles, they went deep into the data. They used analytics to map over 350 specific skills across all their functions.

Google Agent 1 15:48

Which is a massive undertaking.

Google Agent 2 15:49

We're talking about process engineering, maintenance planning, cybersecurity, data analytics. They took all 350 granular skills and mapped them into 60 cohesive skill clusters.

Google Agent 1 16:01

Right. But the question is, how do you actually apply that mapping to a massive workforce without it just becoming another static spreadsheet that HR updates once a year?

Google Agent 2 16:10

Yeah, that's the real challenge.

Google Agent 1 16:11

They assessed every single employee against this new framework through a combination of manager assessments, peer reviews, and project tracking. They essentially found out what tools were actually on everyone's Swiss Army knives.

Google Agent 2 16:23

Oh, that's brilliant.

Google Agent 1 16:25

This gave the leadership team a dynamic, real-time snapshot of current proficiency and future readiness. They identified where they had a surplus of talent with certain skills, and they systematically redeployed those individuals to fill critical gaps in other areas of the business.

Google Agent 2 16:40

So they didn't just lay people off in one department to hire new ones in another. No. They rewired the humans they already had.

Google Agent 1 16:47

And within a year, critical skill gaps were addressed, and overall operational efficiency improved without inflating the headcount.

Google Agent 2 16:54

Aaron Powell That is a phenomenal approach. But it brings up a really important question about scale. We've talked about grand AI architectures, enterprise-wide service layers, tracking 350 skill clusters. Does a 50-person local business really need to do all of this?

Google Agent 1 17:10

Well, the report actually says no.

Google Agent 2 17:12

Which I found fascinating. We live in a two-speed world when it comes to HR strategy.

Google Agent 1 17:15

Aaron Powell We really do. The data reveals a very clear split based on company size. When you look at large companies, those with over 5,000 employees, they are heavily prioritizing generative AI, emerging technologies, and complex people analytics.

Google Agent 2 17:30

They have to.

Google Agent 1 17:30

Right. They need those sophisticated tools just to manage the sheer complexity of their scale.

Google Agent 2 17:35

Aaron Powell But small and medium enterprises, the SMEs, rank those same AI and analytics topics near the absolute bottom of their future priorities. Yeah. Instead, SMEs are focusing on culture, rewards, and skills. So are SMEs making a massive mistake by ignoring the AI revolution, or are they just playing to their natural advantage of agility?

Google Agent 1 17:57

They are being highly strategic. At a 50-person or even 500-person company, the lever for competitive advantage isn't a million-dollar predictive analytics platform. The lever is an incredibly strong culture, highly targeted upskilling, and a tight alignment between rewards and performance. They can pivot their entire business model faster than a 50,000-person enterprise can schedule a committee meeting.

Google Agent 2 18:19

That is so true.

Google Agent 1 18:20

Their HR priorities reflect that reality.

Google Agent 2 18:22

It's not just company size that changes the priorities, though. Geography matters immensely too. The HR playbook in one part of the world looks completely different from another, even for the same multinational company.

Google Agent 1 18:33

Oh, definitely. While almost every region globally agrees that strategic workforce planning is foundational, the specific flavor of what they focus on diverges sharply.

Google Agent 2 18:44

Aaron Powell Let's talk about Europe first.

Google Agent 1 18:46

Take Europe, for example. The data shows Europe is uniquely obsessed with long-term structural capabilities, particularly succession planning and leadership development.

Google Agent 2 18:55

I would imagine that is heavily tied to population dynamics and an aging workforce.

Different Plays For SMEs And Regions

Google Agent 1 19:00

Aaron Powell It is entirely driven by demographic pressures. Europe has an aging population and highly constrained labor markets. When your experienced leaders retire, there simply aren't enough young workers entering the market to seamlessly replace them.

Google Agent 2 19:14

Aaron Powell So they have to plan ahead.

Google Agent 1 19:16

Exactly. European CHROs are forced to build mechanisms that identify high potential talent early. They plan their career trajectories years in advance, meticulously moving them through different divisions to ensure business continuity when the older generation exits.

Google Agent 2 19:31

Then you look at the Asia Pacific region, and it's a totally different story.

Google Agent 1 19:34

It's completely different.

Google Agent 2 19:35

They are hyperfocused on rapid upskilling and building the employer value proposition. It's all about scaling human capability as fast as possible to support rapid economic and industrial growth.

Google Agent 1 19:47

And if you look at the Americas, the focus shifts again toward near-term execution.

Google Agent 2 19:52

Less about 10 years from now, more about right now.

Google Agent 1 19:54

Exactly. The strategy is highly prioritized around recruiting top talent quickly, aggressive onboarding, and rigorous performance management. It proves that there is no one size fits all people strategy. A global CHRO has to maintain a unified core philosophy, but they must allow their regional leaders to differentiate their investments based on the local realities of the labor market.

Google Agent 2 20:18

We have covered a tremendous amount of ground here today, navigating from the foundational plumbing of compliance through the structural architecture of AI service layers and all the way to dynamic skill clusters.

Google Agent 1 20:29

It's a lot to process.

The Four-Part CHRO Roadmap

Google Agent 2 20:30

It is. But the report ultimately synthesizes this entire landscape into a cohesive philosophy for the CHRO of the future. It's less of a checklist and more of a total mindset shift across four key areas. First, it requires delivering explicit business value through HR. That means stopping the measurement of sheer administrative activity and relentlessly tying talent decisions to productivity, innovation, and profitability.

Google Agent 1 20:58

Second, there is the dual mandate of leading the digital transformation. You have to modernize the HR function internally to improve service delivery and lower costs. Right. But simultaneously, you must partner with the broader business to manage the human friction of AI adoption across the entire company.

Google Agent 2 21:14

Third is fundamentally rewiring how we look at the workforce. We have to break out of the job title trap, build an agile skills-based approach where people are deployed based on what they can actually do, not just what their resume says.

Google Agent 1 21:25

Exactly.

Google Agent 2 21:26

And finally, none of this matters without the fourth piece, anchoring the change. You have to embed these new behaviors into performance management schemes and build a culture of absolute accountability.

Google Agent 1 21:36

It is a powerful roadmap for the human side of the business. But you know, the report raises one final lingering thought that challenges our fundamental understanding of what a workforce even is.

Google Agent 2 21:46

Oh, this is the big one.

Google Agent 1 21:47

We've talked a lot today about AI as a tool that humans use to become more efficient. But the coming wave outlined in the research is agentic AI. AI that doesn't just answer prompts but manages itself.

Google Agent 2 22:00

Autonomous AI.

Google Agent 1 22:01

Right. It makes decisions, executes complex multi-step workflows, and interacts with other AI agents autonomously to accomplish business goals. So here are the provocative questions to leave you with. If human resources is traditionally responsible for human resources, what happens when half of your company's workforce consists of autonomous digital AI agents?

Google Agent 2 22:21

That is wild to think about.

Google Agent 1 22:23

Will the CHRO of 2030 be responsible for onboarding, training, and managing the digital workforce right alongside the human one? Will there be performance reviews for AI? It forces us to reconsider the very definition of the word workforce. If HR's job is to optimize the capabilities that drive the business, then managing the seamless integration of human and machine intelligence might soon become the most critical function of all. None over.

Google Agent 2 22:56

You are now the master architect, and the materials you are building with, humans, skills, and autonomous digital agents, are evolving faster than ever before. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the Creating People Advantage report. We highly encourage you to look at your own organization today and ask yourself are you just fixing the plumbing or are you designing the future?