The shift in the Leadership Team now is that business leaders increasingly need HR leaders at the table because business transformation itself has become a people, skills, and work-design issue.
BCG’s Creating People Advantage 2026 finds that 65% of senior leaders see HR as a key business enabler, reflecting a growing expectation that HR should contribute directly to business performance, transformation, and value creation.
The question is no longer simply: it is “What value will HR create once we are at the table?”
The capability gap is where the opportunity lies
BCG’s 2026 “Need-to-Act” matrix highlights a clear gap: the areas expected to matter most for the future—AI, digital HR, strategic workforce planning, leadership, reskilling and people analytics—are also areas where many organizations are still building capability. BCG assesses these priorities by comparing their future importance with organizations’ current capabilities.
This is particularly relevant as AI begins to reshape not only HR processes, but the nature of work itself.
AI can help us work better and faster. But I see the real transformation as moving humans from being “in the loop,” involved in every operational step, toward being “on the loop”—setting direction, challenging outputs, exercising judgment, and remaining accountable for outcomes.
This shift must start with leaders. They need to understand the opportunity, visibly lead the change, and build the capabilities required to turn AI investment into measurable business value.
What does this look like in practice?
For us, this is already becoming part of my day-to-day work as an HR leader. We use AI to create value in three areas:
Better decisions
Analyzing headcount trends, modeling workforce scenarios, evaluating organization design options, and challenging assumptions.
Better influence
Strengthening executive communication, framing sensitive messages, and improving stakeholder alignment.
Better execution
Accelerating reporting, process mapping, presentations, and translating HR data into business insights.
The value is not simply in completing tasks faster. AI gives me more capacity to focus on what still requires human judgment: understanding context, engaging stakeholders, balancing risks and trade-offs, and taking accountability for the final decision.
But adoption is not the same as impact. Nearly 70% of surveyed organizations use GenAI, yet only 38% consider it highly or strongly relevant to their organization today. And only 11% have an enterprise-wide skills architecture.
The gap, therefore, is not simply technology adoption. It is execution.
Organizations need to redesign work, rethink roles, reskill people, strengthen workforce resilience, and connect AI with talent and workforce strategy. The objective is not simply to have more or fewer people.
It is to match the right capabilities with the right work, design roles effectively, and enable people to contribute at their fullest potential.
This is where the CHRO agenda is evolving. We agree with BCG’s four priorities for CHRO success:
- Deliver business value through HR: Connect people strategy directly to business priorities and measurable outcomes.
- Lead the AI and digital transformation: Modernize HR while helping the broader organization navigate the workforce and talent implications of AI.
- Build workforce and leadership capabilities: Develop the skills, roles, and leadership capabilities required for the future—not simply fill today’s vacancies.
- Anchor the change: Ensure that new technologies, behaviors, and ways of working actually become embedded in the organization.
The organizations that benefit from AI will not necessarily be those that simply adopt the most technology. They will need to combine technology, people, skills, leadership, and work redesign effectively.
And this is what moving from “in the loop” to “on the loop” means to me:
- Technology accelerates performance.
- People provide direction, judgment, and accountability.
- HR connects the two to business value.
