Amid growing pressures around AI – from its impact on work design to talent management complexities – experts are urging HR to become ‘ripple-effect strategists’ to uncover unforeseen risks and design work in ways that benefit both the business and its workforce. Here are three focus areas to start with.
Senior executives are entering 2026 with ambitious expectations. Growth remains the number-one priority for CEOs in an environment characterised by economic uncertainty, cost pressure and technological change – a backdrop HR practitioners are all too familiar with at this point.
At Gartner’s HR Symposium, held last month in Sydney, Neal Woolrich, Director, Business and Technology Insights at Gartner, highlighted that leaders are seeking growth “at the lowest possible cost”, and CFOs have responded by targeting increased revenue and output “without increasing headcount at all”.
Most organisations are continuing to position AI as the tool to make this possible.
Woolrich cited research which showed around nine in ten organisations have rolled out some form of AI this year, and more than 80 per cent of CEOs increased their AI investment in the third quarter. Yet businesses have yet to see their desired returns.
“Gartner data shows that only one in three AI initiatives boosts productivity,” said Woolrich at the event. “One in five delivers measurable ROI, and just one in 50 delivers disruptive value.”
For HR leaders, this creates a pressure cooker environment, as they face expectations to cut labour costs, fierce competition for critical talent and pressure to demonstrate value from an emerging technology that is not yet delivering consistently.
But the message from Gartner’s analysts was not pessimistic. Katie Sutherland, Director – Gartner HR Advisory, described the moment as a “huge opportunity” for HR to work with the C-suite to redesign work itself.
“In the AI era, HR has a new mandate, and [this is] a shift in focus. To build an organisation fit for the AI era, we need to shift our focus from the workforce to the work. We need to help our organisations decide what work needs to get done, where it gets done and how,” said Sutherland.
Redefining HR’s mandate: from workforce to work
HR’s historic strength has been in readying the workforce for change. As Sutherland noted, when strategies shift, HR practitioners “hire new people, train leaders and evolve culture”.
During the pandemic, HR was central to supporting people through turbulence. But in the AI era, this instinct is no longer enough. The starting point must be the work itself.
“Before we can answer any questions about the workforce, we need to answer questions about the work,” said Woolrich.
Work is changing because organisational priorities and the tools available are changing. Without clarity on the work, workforce decisions risk becoming misaligned.
Woolrich and Sutherland identified three types of work changes that are now occurring simultaneously:
- Augmenting work – adding AI to existing tasks to improve speed or quality
- Re-engineering work – redesigning entire processes where AI handles significant components
- Reinventing work – creating new AI-enabled ways of operating that shift business models.
Most organisations will pursue all three to varying degrees. Based on interviews with HR leaders, Gartner reported that the upcoming 12 months will involve roughly 45 per cent of focus on augmentation, 30 per cent on re-engineering and 25 per cent on reinvention.
Woolrich urged HR leaders to map their organisation’s portfolio of work changes as a first priority. Without this portfolio view, AI investments become reactive and fragmented, leaving HR on the back foot.
HR thought starter: If you plotted your business units across augment, re-engineer and reinvent, where would each sit?
1. Augmentation: shifting from experimentation to guided value
Augmentation is likely the lowest-risk form of AI adoption. The work largely stays the same, but AI acts as an assistant or enhancer. However, the reality is that most organisations are not seeing the clear returns they expected.
Gartner’s survey of more than 3000 employees found that, while only a small minority are resisting AI, very few have become high-value users.
“Employees know how to use AI at least well enough,” Woolrich said. “But they don’t know where to use AI.”
Many organisations have taken a light-touch approach, allowing employees to explore AI tools at their own discretion, without clear direction. While this experimentation has value in early phases, Sutherland noted that it now “leaves returns on the table” precisely at a time when organisations cannot afford it.
The key takeaway from this part of their presentation was that guidance matters. Gartner’s modelling shows that when organisations direct employees toward meaningful AI use cases, the proportion of “AI superstars” grows from three per cent to 15 per cent, and overall value lifts.
They demonstrated how HR and IT can jointly accelerate this shift with an example from a Canadian tech company called Exonify. Their CHRO and CIO co-designed AI workshops that brought business leaders, HR and IT together to identify real business challenges and explore targeted AI solutions.
This model moves AI out of the experimentation phase and into operational improvement. HR advises on role and skill implications, while IT provides tool selection and technical guidance.
Leadership behaviour is the other critical lever in ensuring guidance around AI use is clear.
Sutherland observed that “81 per cent of [CHROs] said that legacy ways of thinking are preventing leaders from leading through AI transformation.”
HR thought starter: Where could a lack of guidance or leadership capability be slowing AI value creation in your organisation, and which meaningful pain points could HR and IT jointly target?
2. Re-engineering: anticipating and managing ripple effects
Re-engineering work is more disruptive. It involves shifting entire workflows so AI takes on substantial operational responsibility. It can create significant efficiency gains, but the talent implications are often underestimated.
Sutherland referred to a financial services organisation as a cautionary tale. Machine learning at the organisation was applied to fraud detection, and the system quickly outperformed humans on initial analysis. Human specialists still reviewed outputs and made final decisions, but instead of dozens of people working on fraud, they only needed a handful.
“In the AI era, HR’s calling is to shift our focus from the workforce to the work.” – Neal Woolrich, Director, Business and Technology Insights, Gartner
“But the problem [was that] this change was made without HR,” she said.
“In HR’s absence at the table, the business failed to consider the many talent implications. The talent pipeline, dead. All the entry-level roles are gone. Where will the next set of experts come from? The team’s now fully dependent on AI, which we all know is not fully robust. What happens when inevitably the AI model breaks, and no one remembers how to deliver manually anymore?
“The organisational structure is unrecognisable; there’s no career path for individuals in these roles anymore.”
To avoid unforeseen risks like this, HR’s role is to become a ripple-effect strategist, anticipating the implications of re-engineering decisions before they escalate. This involves three key actions:
- Set principles for redesign. These principles should reflect organisational mission and risk appetite.
- Plan for the work, not just the workforce. For example, ServiceNow has introduced a workforce planning council to agree on the two or three most important work changes in each function and to track progress. Cross-functional pods then redesign work and escalate ripple effects early.
- Focus on the most disruptive changes. Skills atrophy is one example. Gartner predicts that by next year, 50 per cent of organisations will require AI-free skills assessments to counter declining critical thinking skills.
The aim is not to slow re-engineering, but to ensure it is done responsibly and sustainably, with transparent trade-offs and coordination across functions.
HR thought starter: Which re-engineering decisions are currently being made without HR involvement, and what ripple effects might already be forming beneath the surface? How can your organisation surface these risks in a consistent and ongoing manner?
3. Inventing new ways of working: timing the disruption
The most transformative changes come from inventing new ways of working powered by autonomous AI agents.
Sutherland used the hypothetical example of a sales executive whose routine tasks could soon be performed by AI agents.
“Imagine her work in a couple of years. She logs in and she’s greeted by several autonomous AI agents. They prioritise leads, handle research and analysis, and even nurture prospects, making key decisions all on their own. These agents use internal systems like calendars, emails and chat, and check in with [the sales executive] once they’ve completed the complex tasks that she has assigned them.”
This scenario “sounds like science fiction”, she said, but it’s not. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15 per cent of day-to-day organisational decisions will be made autonomously by AI.
While this may trigger fears of AI-related job cuts, Woolrich clarified that “less than one per cent of job losses [this year] were the result of AI taking someone’s job.”
Seventeen per cent were due to “talent remixing”, he said.
“This is what’s happening when organisations say they expect their headcount to remain flat in the coming years. It’s called a talent remix, meaning we’re making tough decisions about shifting talent investment from lower-performing areas of the business to parts of the organisation where we’re inventing.”
Almost eight in 10 job losses were completely unrelated to AI. Even under aggressive assumptions, AI-related job loss in Australia is expected to remain below one per cent through 2028.
With this in mind, they say HR’s task is to:
- Reset expectations using data and tools, such as Gartner’s hype cycle
- Sense the right timing for when specific roles will be meaningfully affected
- Create internal pathways into growth roles so talent remixing does not lead to redundancy.
For example, Red Hat, an American software company, segmented roles by expected AI disruption, identified at-risk roles and required growth skills, and supported internal movement through immersion experiences and education grants.
It is also developing an external job marketplace for employees who may not wish to transition internally – a model that could become more common as regulation evolves.
Policy developments are already reshaping the landscape. Sutherland pointed to a recent High Court ruling allowing the Fair Work Commission to test whether an employer could have redeployed a person into a contractor role before redundancy. Longer-term, Gartner predicts that by 2032, at least 30 per cent of top economies will require certified human quotas.
HR thought starter: Which roles in your organisation are realistically likely to be reshaped by AI within the next three years, and what internal pathways could you establish now to move people proactively into growth areas?
Next steps
The message from Gartner’s experts is ultimately constructive. The pressure is real, but it is navigable if HR reframes its role.
“In the AI era, HR’s calling is to shift our focus from the workforce to the work,” said Woolrich.
That shift enables HR to guide augmentation, steward responsible re-engineering and time the invention of new ways of working.
It is a demanding agenda, but also a defining opportunity for HR leaders to shape the work of the future – deliberately, responsibly and with far greater clarity than has been afforded to them in previous years.
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