The HR leaders who look past the old work design playbook and act strategically today will be the architects of the future.

The organisations that pull ahead in the next decade will be defined by one thing: whether their Chief People Officer is driving workforce strategy or just supporting it.

Two forces are converging right now. AI isn’t just automating tasks; it’s dismantling and rebuilding the very architecture of work – what roles exist, what skills they demand and what a productive day looks like. And, in parallel, demographically, the workforce itself is being recomposed: who shows up, for how long, under what arrangement and with what expectations.

Neither of these is an HR ‘problem’ to be managed. They are the defining strategic challenge of the coming decade. And yet the human capital systems most organisations rely on are built for a different era and remain largely unchanged.

HR leaders are uniquely positioned to see that these two megatrends need a combined workforce design approach for business growth and resilience. HR practitioners are best placed to be the architects of these future outcomes, yet many are waiting for the invitation to lead, rather than stepping up.

The elevation opportunity

The CPO has always held an important seat at the executive table. What’s changing is the scope of what that seat must now strategise, architect and execute on.

The strategic conversation about the future of work has been primarily framed as tech decisions with people implications. That framing is shifting with our experience. The fundamental redesign of work and roles are, at their core, human capital centred opportunities. And yet the workforce planning assumptions we’re running with remain largely traditional.

Thought leaders are reflecting this reality. Bain & Company’s recent CPO Forum concluded that “the context in which most HR leaders built their careers is not the context in which they will lead the future”. 

The World Economic Forum’s May 2026 CPO Outlook identifies job and organisational redesign as the dominant strategic priority among more than 130 global people leaders. The language emerging consistently across global research is deliberate: architect.

Not administrator. Not implementer. Architect. This is the opportunity for HR leaders.

The AI agenda

HR leaders are navigating AI changes daily, increasingly within their own function. The uncertainty is substantial: how do you redesign job architecture when roles are evolving faster than descriptions can capture? How do you build agility into structures designed for stability? How do you reframe performance when work is shifting from technical execution toward what machines can’t replicate – judgment, experience and the ability to navigate genuine complexity?

The profession is responding. KPMG’s Voice of the CHRO names the agenda: redesigning work, reskilling labour and orchestrating the human-AI balance across the enterprise.

“HR practitioners are best placed to be the architects of these future outcomes, yet many are waiting for the invitation to lead, rather than stepping up.”

Leading organisations are repositioning the CPO as a co-architect of transformation. Moderna merged its people and digital technology functions under a single mandate. Standard Chartered’s CHRO holds a dual mandate as Chief Strategy and Talent Officer. And Atlassian’s CPO now also leads the tech giant’s AI agenda because it can see that technical and cultural transformation are inseparable.

But the AI transformation doesn’t play out in a vacuum. It lands on a workforce that is itself being fundamentally recomposed – and that second shift is receiving a fraction of the strategic attention it deserves.

The missing megatrend

Of all the forces reshaping the workforce, demographic ageing is a critical trend impacting future workforces.

Bain & Company highlights that the working-age population is shifting, and median age is increasing. In G7 economies, workers aged 55+ will exceed 25 per cent of the workforce by 2031, up from 15 per cent in 2011. 

The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 offers an economic perspective: mobilising older workers is identified as the single most powerful lever available to offset population ageing and sustain GDP per capita growth.

Australia mirrors that trajectory. Workforce participation begins declining from age 45 – from 91.7 per cent at 40-44 years old to just 68.1 per cent by 60-64 years old (ABS, 2024). This is a significant participation loss across the 45-65 cohort, and it’s occurring well before pension age (67 years old). 

Workers are exiting the workforce often before their professional contribution has peaked. Many want to work. Many need to work. But they are finding it increasingly difficult to access meaningful work on terms that reflect the skills and experience they bring. This is not a future trend; it’s a structural shift already in play, creating an increasingly underleveraged capability.

Against that backdrop, Australia faces a skills shortage that’s constraining the growth of many businesses. Often, part of that shortage is self-made. Assumptions embedded in how organisations approach their workforce – such as the belief that capability inevitably declines in mature workers – quietly narrow the talent pool before the search for skills has even begun. These are assumptions HR is well placed to challenge.

For example, take this IMF research. Drawing on cognitive health data across 41 economies, Gruss and Noureldin found that “when it comes to cognitive capacities, the 70s are indeed the new 50s: a person who was 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive health score as a 53-year-old in 2000.” 

Another assumption worth challenging is that this cohort is digitally disengaged. AARP and LinkedIn research shows the technology learning gap among older professionals narrowed from 31.1 per cent to just 10.7 per cent between 2022 and 2025. All age demographics in the organisation are learning right now. What the experienced 45-65 worker brings is hard-earned judgment skills, which AI cannot replicate. 

Yet, according to AHRI’s research, nearly one in four Australian HR professionals now classify workers aged 51-55 as “older” – a figure that has more than doubled since 2023. Only 56 per cent say they are open to hiring workers aged 50-64 “to a large extent”.

In a skills-short economy, that is worth pausing on. Do our workforce assumptions need reframing? 

The new design agenda

Seeing these trends clearly – and designing for them – is the work of the modern HR leader. Clearly, some of our human capital systems are outdated, so rearchitecting for both forces is the most consequential strategic move available to the modern HR leader. 

The starting point is honest scrutiny of the things no longer serving us. Job architectures that still assume linear progression. Talent investment weighted toward early career. Succession logic that fades at 50. Systems built for a 70-year life rather than today’s reality of 100 years. 

None of these systems were designed for a multi-stage working life – careers that span 50 years, an intergenerational workforce, or an AI-first environment demanding continuous role redesign. AI and demographic shift are not two separate agendas. They are a single work design challenge sitting within the HR leader’s mandate.

The HR leader cannot optimise for inherited systems. They need to rearchitect them for the enterprise. According to HBR’s analysis of emerging work trends, by 2030 more than 30 million jobs per year will be redesigned, not eliminated, by AI.

Designing for the full workforce, rather than missing a cohort, will help organisations carve out a competitive advantage. The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 finds positive productivity effects for firms with a more balanced age structure, as age diversity is associated with higher productivity and lower turnover.

“AI transformation doesn’t play out in a vacuum. It lands on a workforce that is itself being fundamentally recomposed – and that second shift is receiving a fraction of the strategic attention it deserves.”

Four moves you can make now

Leading organisations aren’t waiting for the perfect strategy. They’re clarifying intent and outcomes, running pilots, learning fast and building on what works. We’re not starting from scratch. 

The playbook is already being written by governments and businesses globally. At an organisational level, this looks like: 

1. Audit your workforce reality.

Understand what your 45+ workforce looks like – roles, contribution, development investment received. Then examine your processes: where is age operating as an invisible constraint? Where do job descriptions, promotion criteria, development access and succession assumptions have age baked in?

Engage the 45-65 cohort directly to understand their aspirations, needs and challenges. The audit builds a foundation for leadership awareness and deliberate work design. 

These changes take time and require underlying rigorous data. Consider building a dashboard to capture and track progress.

2. Map future capability to possibly overlooked talent pools.

Pose the question: are we tapping all available talent pools? ServiceNow research indicates 71 per cent of business leaders haven’t mapped the skills needed to operationalise their AI strategy.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report reinforces the stakes: organisations taking a technology-first approach to AI are 1.6 times more likely to fall short of expected returns compared to those prioritising human-centred design.

Workers aged 45+ bring judgment-intensive capabilities, which are increasingly critical in an AI-driven workplace, such as deep contextual understanding, pattern recognition from experience and the ability to interpret and challenge AI outputs where data alone is insufficient. 

Alongside this, they typically demonstrate stronger interpersonal skills, emotional regulation, and resilience. Microsoft’s 2025 New Future of Work Report indicates that as AI automates routine tasks, these higher-order capabilities – sense-making, synthesis, accountable decision-making – are becoming more valuable than technical execution itself.

3. Redesign contribution for longer careers and multi-stage lives.

We can intentionally reshape employment models informed by the needs of both employers and employees. The traditional work contract – long-term employment in exchange for stability and retirement security – is giving way to more flexible, modular models of contribution across longer working lives, as outlined by Joe Coughlin, MIT AgeLabs. 

Organisations can deliberately redesign how contribution happens across longer lives: phased engagement, portfolio/fractional roles and structured knowledge-transfer pathways that allow all workers – including experienced ones – to engage with work differently while still creating value. 

4. Build an intergenerational advantage and equip your managers to lead it.

Make age diversity a deliberate design choice. Younger workers bring AI fluency and fresh perspective. Mature workers bring crystallised judgment and organisational literacy. Bringing these workers together amplifies AI outcomes and drives stronger innovation and performance. 

BCG research finds that companies with age-diverse leadership deliver 19 per cent higher revenue from innovation. This is your business case.

But system design alone is not enough. As Josh Bersin notes, building managers’ capabilities to lead age-diverse teams, and recognise and counter default assumptions, is the implementation layer companies rely on.

Taking the lead

The HR leaders building for the decade ahead need to rearchitect human capital systems – bringing people strategy into AI decisions, redesigning contribution models for longer working lives and creating career pathways that reflect the workforce as it is. 

The organisations that move on this now will build a competitive advantage that compounds over time. This is the strategic voice your organisation needs most right now and is exactly the expertise HR practitioners are positioned to bring.

Michele Lemmens is the Founder of The Longevity Lens and an upcoming speaker at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition, held in Brisbane from 4-6 August.

🧰 HR’s career resource toolkit

• National Convention and Exhibition: Michele Lemmens will explore these ideas further at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Get your ticket today.
• Learning: Gain the tools to optimise job design amid rapid organisational change and evolving ways of working with AHRI’s Contemporary Workforce Redesign Course.
• Learning: Sign up for AHRI’s Embedding Responsible AI course to stay ahead of AI-driven change, keep your HR practices compliant and ensure your organisation is protected.
• Article: How HR can design work experiences for the multi-stage life.