Ask the Analyst: What’s the hardest truth that HR leaders aren’t confronting?  

Every week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s brand-new weekly intelligence newsletter for senior decision-makers, we put an important question to the true HR experts: Our community of analysts.

Got a big problem you need help with? Make sure you’re signed up to The Briefing so you can ask the analysts for their perspectives!

This week’s question: What’s the hardest truth that HR leaders aren’t confronting?

Here’s what the analysts had to say.

David Green, Managing Partner, Insight222

The future of work is not primarily about technology — it is about organizational redesign.

Many companies are still layering AI onto outdated workflows, structures and leadership models, expecting transformation without fundamentally changing how work gets done. That approach will fail.

The real disruption is not that AI will replace jobs at scale; it is that it will expose weak operating models, slow decision-making, poor management and outdated skill structures.

Research from the likes of McKinsey, Stanford and BCG increasingly shows that organizations creating value from AI are redesigning workflows, redefining decision rights and investing heavily in workforce adaptability — not simply deploying tools.

This means that HR can no longer operate downstream of strategy. HR must become an architect of organizational reinvention, helping leaders decide which work should be automated, augmented or uniquely human. That requires new capabilities in workforce planning, analytics, experimentation and AI governance.

The organizations that thrive will not be those with the most advanced technology. They will be those that redesign work fastest while maintaining trust, adaptability and human connection.

That is a far harder challenge than implementing AI and one many HR leaders are still underestimating.

Cheney Hamilton, Research Director, Bloor Research

The hardest truth HR leaders aren’t confronting is that AI is not a tool. It is a new form of labor.

Digital workers are now starting to create economic outputs alongside human workers, and that changes everything. Workforce structures, governance, employment models, ownership, cost, liability, and ultimately what we even define as ‘work’.

Most organizations are still trying to force AI onto industrial-era operating models built entirely around human labor. That’s why so many transformations feel chaotic.

Businesses are automating tasks without redesigning the system around them. The result is ‘labor debt’; duplicated work, governance gaps, distrust, stalled adoption, and operating models that no longer reflect how value is actually being created.

HR cannot treat this as another technology rollout. The role of HR now is helping organizations redesign work itself for a mixed human and digital workforce; ethically, sustainably, and before the gap between the formal organization and the real organization becomes impossible to manage.

David Perring, Chief Insights Officer, Fosway Group

Most HR leaders are savvy enough to appreciate that the navigation into the future of work is going to be a bumpy ride, regardless of the transitioning plans they might be making, including modelling the future of work, strategic workforce intelligence and skills-based organizations.

Change is rarely gradual; it comes in leaps and rapid innovations can create fault lines, tremors, earthquakes and pain.

The next few years are going to bring many of these moments.

However, what might catch HR leaders off guard might be the tsunami of disruption coming to their own function as AI pushes a whole new wave of AI enabled manager self-service and employee self-service that wasn’t previously possible in a human only world.

When your HR Business partner is an always-on HR AI Business Partner - an expert in all HR fields available 24/7 who else will a manager or employee need to turn to?

Today, for most, we are a way away from that model - but the direction of travel is clear.

Jason Averbook, Co-Founder, Now to Next

The hardest truth HR leaders aren't confronting is that we built the function on transaction volume and transaction volume is evaporating, not someday but now!

Most HR professionals' identity is tied to the machine, not the outcome. They know how well the machine runs. Strip the machine away and what's left? What judgment do you provide that a well-prompted model cannot? Most people in HR don't have a crisp answer and "I'm a people person" is not an answer.

HRBP as designed is middleware dressed up as a strategy role. AI is better middleware because it never sleeps, scales to every manager simultaneously, and doesn't misread the room politically.

The liaison role that translated data for business leaders? That's gone or going away fast.

What actually survives is rare. The ability to read a culture as a living system. Telling a CEO something they don't want to hear and making it stick. Trust that requires real skin in the game.

That's a smaller function than what most HR orgs look like today. Smaller. More leveraged and more human.

The real question — the one nobody's saying out loud yet isn't "will AI replace HR?”, it’s ‘were we ever actually doing what we told ourselves we were doing, or were we managing transactions and calling it strategy?’

That one requires courage to for us to deal with.

Jordan Hammerstad, Associate Director, Research, The Josh Bersin Company

One of the hardest truths about the future of work is one most HR leaders won't say out loud: the HR function is optimizing for its own survival at the exact moment the business needs it to redesign everything.

HR doesn't exist to do HR. HR exists to optimize the performance and culture of the company. Every program, every process, every technology investment only matters if it makes the company grow, innovate faster, and take better care of its people. The moment HR loses sight of that and starts optimizing for itself, it becomes irrelevant.

L&D is a prime example: the function built to develop people has spent decades perfecting courses instead of the conditions for building capabilities. Building capability means connecting learning directly to work, to skills, to business outcomes, not measuring success by completions, but by what actually changes in the workforce as a result.

The HR leaders who are thriving are the ones who have already stopped asking ‘how do we protect our function?’ and started asking ‘what does this business actually need from us right now?’

Chris Havrilla, Chief Advisor & Analyst, AI Alchemists

The hardest truth? Most HR leaders are optimizing a function that AI is quietly dismantling underneath them and calling it transformation.

HR has always mediated between humans and the systems that employ and manage them. AI isn’t just changing systems. It’s changing who and what is being employed, and how.

Build-borrow-buy-bot isn't a sourcing model. It is a model rearchitecting work and workforce models while most HR functions are still trying to organize around job roles, requisitions, and reviews as if the work itself hasn't shifted.

Actions speak louder than words.

If your AI strategy is efficiencies inside existing 'processes', you're not transforming. You're embalming. You're making a dying operating model run faster.

The leaders who’ll matter in five years won't be the ones who deployed the most agents. They'll be the ones with the courage to ask whether the function they inherited should exist at all; and then architected the consequences of that answer instead of inheriting someone else's.

Think big. Start small. Move fast. Never end.